Hunter API review
Best documented starter
GET /v2/email-finder?domain=example.com&first_name={first_name}&last_name={last_name} X-API-KEY: $HUNTER_KEY # 15 requests a second, 500 a minute # api_key=test-api-key returns a dummy response, free # 403 means rate limit. 429 means you are out of credits.
The Hunter API is the one most people in this directory used first, usually without meaning to evaluate anything. It does three things well: find an address from a name and a domain, verify an address, and return every address a domain is known to publish. That third one, Domain Search, is the reason Hunter survives in a market full of cheaper per-credit providers.
Pricing is a straightforward credit subscription. Starter is $49 a month for 2,000 credits, which works out at $0.0245 each, and the free plan gives you 50 credits a month indefinitely. Credits are shared across Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search, so a verification costs the same as a find.
The Hunter.io API is also the best documented product here by some distance. Every endpoint publishes its own rate limit, there is a test key that returns a dummy response for free, and the error codes are specific. The one thing to read carefully is what those error codes mean, because Hunter uses them differently from almost everyone else.
The rest of the category is in the Enrichment APIs listing.
Nine endpoints, one credit balance
Credits come off the same balance whichever endpoint you call, which makes the Hunter API easy to budget and easy to waste. The useful distinction is between the endpoints that answer a question about one person and the ones that return a set.
| Endpoint | What it returns | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|
| Domain Search | Every email address found on one domain, with the sources for each. | 15/s, 500/min |
| Multi-Domain Search | The same, across a list of domains in one call. | 15/s, 500/min |
| Email Finder | The most likely address from a domain, a first name and a last name. | 15/s, 500/min |
| Email Finder (Found) | The same call, restricted to addresses Hunter has actually seen. | 15/s, 500/min |
| Email Verifier | Deliverability for one address, plus whether Hunter has it and where from. | 10/s, 300/min |
| Email Enrichment | The person behind an address. | 15/s, 500/min |
| Company Enrichment | Firmographics for a domain. | 15/s, 500/min |
| Combined | Person and company enrichment in one request. | 15/s, 500/min |
| Discover | Companies matching a set of criteria. The sourcing endpoint. | 5/s, 50/min |
| Email Count | How many addresses a domain has, before you spend a credit finding them. | 15/s |
Discover is the odd one out at 5 requests a second and 50 a minute, a third of what everything else allows. That is a sourcing endpoint returning sets rather than records, so the limit is on result pages rather than on people, but it does mean a list build runs an order of magnitude slower than the enrichment that follows it. Plan the two stages separately.
Before you spend a credit on Domain Search, Email Count tells you how many addresses Hunter holds for that domain. On a list where half the companies return zero, checking first is the difference between paying for 1,000 lookups and paying for 500. It is the cheapest optimization available on this API and most people never find it.
Hunter API pricing, plan by plan
Hunter API pricing is a flat credit subscription with no per-seat component and no pay as you go option. Four published tiers, and paying yearly cuts roughly 30% off every one of them.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial
- Domain Search, Email Finder and Email Verifier
- Enough to measure your own match rate
- Renews every month, indefinitely
Starter
- $34 a month paid yearly, 24,000 credits upfront
- $0.0245 per credit at the monthly rate
- Credits shared across find, verify and search
Growth
- $104 a month paid yearly, 120,000 credits upfront
- $0.0149 per credit at the monthly rate
Scale
- $209 a month paid yearly, 300,000 credits upfront
- $0.0120 per credit at the monthly rate
The per-credit rate halves between Starter and Scale, from $0.0245 to $0.0120, so volume is rewarded more here than on most credit plans. Enterprise is a custom quote. Hunter also sells sending infrastructure as add-ons rather than bundling it: extra email accounts from $10 a month, custom domains with accounts from $6, and Inbox Protection from $6 to $7.50 per account per month.
Monthly credits reset at renewal and do not roll over, which is the usual arrangement and the usual problem for uneven workloads. Paying yearly changes the mechanics rather than just the price: you get the entire annual allowance upfront, so 24,000 credits on Starter are available on day one rather than 2,000 a month. For agency work with lumpy list builds that is worth more than the 30% discount.
Published per endpoint, which is rare
Hunter API rate limits are documented individually for every endpoint rather than as one number for the account, which is unusual and genuinely useful: you can design a pipeline against the real ceiling instead of guessing. Most endpoints allow 15 requests a second and 500 a minute. Email Verifier is tighter at 10 and 300, and Discover is much tighter at 5 and 50.
The error codes are not the usual ones
This is the single thing most likely to cost you an afternoon.
- 403 Forbidden means you have hit the rate limit. Back off and retry.
- 429 Too many requests means you are out of credits. Retrying will not help.
- 401 Unauthorized means no valid API key was provided.
- Most APIs use 429 for the first case, so a generic retry wrapper will do exactly the wrong thing on both.
Designing around the ceiling
The numbers are high enough that the credit balance usually binds first.
- 500 a minute on Email Finder is 720,000 a month, far past what any plan sells you in credits.
- Discover at 50 a minute is the only limit likely to shape a job.
- The 10-a-second Verifier limit matters on a bulk cleanup, not on live enrichment.
- Rate limits are per endpoint, so a verify loop does not slow a find loop.
A standard HTTP client retries on 429 and gives up on 403. Against Hunter that is backwards: the 429 is your quota and no amount of retrying creates credits, while the 403 is transient and is exactly the case worth retrying. Teams that wire up a generic backoff library and never read this page end up hammering a quota error and abandoning a rate limit.
How to create a Hunter API key
A Hunter API key takes about thirty seconds and no payment details. Sign up, and the key is on your dashboard at hunter.io/api-keys, where you can also generate and delete keys. The free plan has full API access rather than a trial, so the key works immediately against all three main endpoints.
Three ways to send it
Pick one. The query parameter is the simplest and the least safe.
- ?api_key=YOUR_KEY as a query parameter, which ends up in logs.
- X-API-KEY header, which is the one to use.
- Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY, if that fits your client better.
- The Hunter.io API key identifies your account, so treat it as a password.
The test key
Hunter publishes a shared key for integration work, and it costs nothing.
- Pass api_key=test-api-key and the API validates your parameters.
- It always returns the same dummy response, so assertions have to allow for that.
- Available on Domain Search, Email Finder and Email Verifier.
- Use it for CI and for the first hour of building, and keep your 50 free credits for the match-rate test that matters.
Where the Hunter API documentation lives
Hunter keeps everything on one page, which sounds like a limitation and is actually the reason it is the easiest API here to get working. The Hunter API documentation lists every endpoint, its parameters, its rate limit and its error codes in one scrollable document.
| Surface | Where | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| API documentation | hunter.io/api-documentation | Every endpoint, parameter, rate limit and error code. One page. |
| API keys | hunter.io/api-keys | Retrieve, generate and delete keys. |
| Help center | help.hunter.io | Billing, credits and account questions rather than code. |
| Pricing | hunter.io/pricing | The credit tiers and the sending add-ons. |
There is no versioned OpenAPI spec and no official client library index on that page, which is the trade for the single-page format. For most GTM work that does not matter, because the whole surface is three GET endpoints you can call with curl in a minute.
Hunter also ships an MCP server, and it is on the MCP page with the others in this directory.
Hunter's own product walkthrough
Hunter publishes this on its own channel, so it is Hunter's account of Hunter, not ours. It is here because a rate card cannot show you the thing moving, and a few minutes of the product is faster than any paragraph on this page at telling you whether the shape of it fits yours.
YouTube · Hunter What Is Hunter.io? Full Product Walkthrough (2 minutes) 2:07 · Published July 2026Two minutes, current, and chaptered: finder, verifier, Discover, sequences. It is the product rather than the API. Hunter's channel does carry one API video, about their free company logo endpoint, which is a different product from the one priced here.
Published 9 July 2026 on Hunter, the channel Hunter's own pages link to, and read on 13 October 2026. Nothing in it is a source for a price or a limit on this page: every figure in the tables above comes from a Hunter page.
Strengths and limits
Hunter is the easiest API in this directory to get a result out of, and the hardest to justify at volume.
What it does well
- Domain Search returns every address a company publishes, with sources, which no per-record provider here replicates.
- A real 50-credit free tier every month, not a trial, so you can measure your own match rate before paying.
- Rate limits published per endpoint, so you can design against the actual ceiling.
- A free test key that validates parameters without spending credits, which makes CI straightforward.
- Per-credit cost halves from $0.0245 to $0.0120 between Starter and Scale.
Where it falls short
- At $0.0245 a credit on Starter, it is roughly fifteen times Apollo's per-email rate.
- 403 means rate limit and 429 means out of credits, which is backwards from the convention and will break a generic retry wrapper.
- Credits reset monthly unless you pay a year upfront.
- No mobile numbers, so a phone-first motion needs a second provider.
- Discover is limited to 5 requests a second, an order of magnitude below the enrichment endpoints.
Where Hunter data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hunter | Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
If Hunter is not the answer
Four providers in the Enrichment APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.
Prospeo
$49/moIdentical price for identical credits, plus mobile numbers and stronger European data. The straight swap when coverage is the constraint.
Findymail
$99/moVerifies at find time with a refund above a 5% bounce rate, and rolls credits over to twice your plan.
LeadMagic
$99/moA published credit cost for every operation, mobile at 5 credits, and an MCP server on every plan.
FullEnrich
$55/moWhen coverage is the constraint rather than price: 25 sources behind one call, with personal emails and mobiles Hunter does not return.
The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the Hunter alternatives page.
Hunter against the obvious rival
Same rate cards, read side by side, with the arithmetic done on a worked volume rather than left to you: Findymail vs Hunter, Hunter vs Prospeo and Apollo vs Hunter. Every pairing in the directory is on the compare hub.
Findymail vs Hunter
CompareA refundable bounce guarantee against the best-documented starter in the category.
Hunter vs Prospeo
CompareSame $49, same 2,000 credits, two quite different products.
Apollo vs Hunter
CompareTwenty-five percent apart on the credit and doing two different jobs. One starts from a person, the other from a domain.
Before you build against it
Five things to settle first, each one read off Hunter's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.
Who should actually buy this
Buy Hunter when you start from company domains rather than from named people. Domain Search is the differentiator: give it a domain and it returns the addresses that company publishes along with where each one was seen, which is a different job from guessing an address for a person you already identified.
The free tier makes the decision cheap. 50 credits a month, renewing, with full API access, is enough to run your own segment through it and measure what comes back. Nobody in this category publishes a match rate you can hold them to, so your own list is the only evidence worth anything.
Do not buy it as your bulk enrichment provider. At Starter rates you are paying around fifteen times Apollo per email, and the specialists in this directory are cheaper still. The pattern that works is Hunter for discovery and verification on the domains you care about, with a cheaper per-record provider underneath for volume.
The cheapest credit is the one you do not spend.
Half the money wasted on email APIs goes on lookups that were never going to resolve: dead domains, companies with no public addresses, rows already in the CRM. Frontal builds the filter that runs before the lookup, so you pay for the attempts worth making.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
What Hunter users say, in their own words
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written and linked to the thread.
A bulk verification competes with the thing you bought the plan for
I've used hunter for quite some time. I needed to do a bulk verification and now my plans ruined. Looking for a new option. Spent hundreds with hunter - way more expensive than it once was
r/agency · October 2024 · 1 point
Hunter's subscription plans run one credit pool across Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search, so a one-off list clean draws on the same allowance as finding does. On Starter that allowance is 2,000 credits a month, which makes a 10,000-address verification five months of the plan spent on a job that found nothing new. Credits reset monthly and do not roll over, so there is no banking your way out of it either.
What Hunter publishes for exactly this case is the Data Platform, where search credits and verification credits are bought separately and priced apart from the subscription. That is worth knowing before concluding the plan is the wrong shape, because the complaint is really about using the wrong product rather than about the price.
Only one comment from this harvest is quoted, and that is the finding. Of 83 candidates the highest-scoring were people promoting their own tools, two of them linking a Hunter URL with an affiliate parameter on it, and five more threads turned out to be about LinkHunter, a link-building product with no connection to Hunter.io.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Hunter API, answered
Is the Hunter API free?
Free plan, 50 credits per month. Paid use starts at $49/mo.
How much does the Hunter API cost?
Hunter starts at $49/mo, which works out at $0.025 per credit. Billing is subscription, credit packs and free tier. Read from Hunter's own pricing page on 8 October 2026.
What are the Hunter API rate limits?
Per endpoint: 15/s and 500/min on most, 10/s on Verifier, 5/s on Discover.
How do I get a Hunter API key?
API key in X-API-KEY, as a Bearer token, or as a query parameter. The current steps are in Hunter's own documentation, which is authoritative on anything that has changed since 8 October 2026.
Does Hunter have an MCP server?
Yes, at https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp. It is listed with the others on the MCP page.