RocketReach API review

What each call costs, under both credit systems

On a self-serve plan the unit is the export: a lookup that returns a verified email or phone spends one, and a lookup that finds neither is refunded. Under Universal Credits, which RocketReach is rolling out through account managers, each kind of data has its own price.

Every path above sits under api.rocketreach.co/api/v2, and the bulk lookup at /universal/person/bulk_lookup charges the same rates. The older /person/lookup endpoint draws on export credits instead, and the account endpoint reports your plan, your balances and your rate-limit status for nothing.

RocketReach API pricing, plan by plan

RocketReach API pricing is a seat subscription with an annual export allowance, and API and MCP access are included on every paid plan.

Monthly billing exists on all three plans, with 100, 250 and 1,000 exports a month, and RocketReach advertises 50% savings for annual; the monthly prices were not shown on the page this review read, so the per-export figures above are the annual ones. A free account gets 5 lookups with no card, which is enough to see the response shape and not enough to measure a match rate.

Published per plan, under a global ceiling

RocketReach API rate limits are published per plan and per endpoint, with minute, hour, day and month windows, under a global limit of 10 requests a second across every API. Email verification is the exception: 10 a second and 300 a minute on every plan.

The RocketReach API rate limits are the most complete in this half of the directory, and for most self-serve accounts they never bind before the export allowance does. Plan a big backfill in days rather than hours, and size the plan on exports.

How to create a RocketReach API key

A RocketReach API key is generated in Account Settings with "Generate New API Key", and every request sends it in an Api-Key header. The documentation lets you paste the key and run any endpoint with "Try It", which is the quickest way to see a real response before you write code.

There is little to the key itself. The decision that matters is whether a lookup is synchronous for your workload, and a webhook is the cleaner answer for anything that enriches more than a handful of rows at a time.

What a RocketReach API call looks like

A person lookup takes an identifier, such as a LinkedIn URL, an email, a name and employer, or an NPI number, and returns the contact with a status. If the lookup is still running, poll the status endpoint or let the webhook deliver it.

# 1. look a person up
GET https://api.rocketreach.co/api/v2/person/lookup?linkedin_url=...
Api-Key: $ROCKETREACH_KEY

# 2. verify an address you already have, 10 a second on every plan
POST https://api.rocketreach.co/api/v2/email/verify
# 1 verification credit, refunded if the result is unknown

Where the RocketReach API documentation lives

The RocketReach API documentation lives at docs.rocketreach.co, a ReadMe site that serves any page as Markdown if you append .md and publishes an llms.txt index. The older address many links still use, rocketreach.co/api/v2/docs, no longer returns the reference, so start from the docs host.

Search is paginated at up to 100 profiles a page and 10,000 results a query, so a broad filter has to be narrowed rather than paged to the end. The UI and the API can return different search results, because the UI applies natural-language parsing to facets; RocketReach suggests exact-match values and the order_by parameter when the two disagree.

The MCP page lists RocketReach's MCP access alongside the others in this directory.

RocketReach on video

The section is here either way, because the absence is worth knowing: a vendor with no walkthrough of its own API is a vendor whose docs are the only way in.

Strengths and limits

RocketReach is the published-price answer among the sales intelligence vendors, with one trap on the entry plan.

The two columns add up to a vendor that is unusually honest about price and throughput and unusually easy to buy the wrong plan from. Start on Pro if phones are the point, and on Ultimate if volume is.

Who should actually use this

Use RocketReach when you want programmatic contact data, phones included, from a vendor that publishes every number you need to plan with. Pro at $899 a year is the real entry point for a phone motion, and Ultimate at $1,699 is where the per-export price drops to $0.085 and beats most of this directory on a mobile.

Do not buy Essentials to test the API on phones. It returns emails only, and at $0.33 an export an email there costs seventeen times what Apollo charges for one. If emails are most of what you buy, Apollo or LeadMagic is cheaper at every volume; RocketReach earns its place when the personal email and the direct dial come back on the same export.

Whatever plan you choose, size it on the annual export allowance divided by twelve, and plan any large backfill around the daily lookup cap. Both numbers are published, which is the reason to choose RocketReach over a vendor that will only tell you after the contract.

RocketReach is a pick on both the Kaspr alternatives and ContactOut alternatives pages, for the same reason: it publishes the API price and the limits that those two vendors keep behind sales.

Before you build against it

Five things to settle first, each one read off RocketReach's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.

If RocketReach is not the answer

Three providers in the Enrichment APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.

The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the RocketReach alternatives page.

RocketReach against the obvious rival

Same rate cards, read side by side, with the arithmetic done on a worked volume rather than left to you: Lusha vs RocketReach, Apollo vs RocketReach, Cognism vs RocketReach and RocketReach vs ZoomInfo.

Every pairing in the directory is on the compare hub.