One of two providers here, with Instantly, that covers sourcing, enrichment and sending behind a single key, which is why it is usually the first API a GTM team wires up and the last one they rip out. The catch is that credits and seats are coupled, so the API inherits a per-seat price even when no human logs in.
- People and organization search across Apollo's own database
- Enrichment returns 1 credit for email, 9 if a mobile comes back
- Sequence, contact and task endpoints cost 0 credits
- Credits are granted per seat per YEAR, not per month
Clay is not really an enrichment API, it is the router in front of everybody else's. You pay in actions for the work and data credits for the data rather than per record, and the waterfall logic that would take a week to build yourself is a column setting.
- Waterfall across 150+ data providers without separate contracts
- Two meters, actions and data credits, and neither is charged on a lookup that finds nothing
- Free plan runs 500 actions a month with no phone enrichment
Best for building on top of
PDL sells the dataset rather than the workflow, and its standard subscription agreement licenses you to show its data to your own customers inside your product, which few other self-serve plans here grant by default. It is not a resale license: you may not resell the data or give your users programmatic access to a substantial part of it. That license is the reason to pick it over a cheaper per-email tool.
- Person, company, job title and school datasets under one key
- Free plan obfuscates emails and phones until you upgrade
- Bulk and search endpoints designed for warehouse loads
Best priced per operation
Every operation has a stated credit cost, credits come off only when a lookup succeeds, and search is free in the app and unmetered on the API from Professional. The MCP server ships on every tier, including the cheapest.
- Email finder 1 credit, mobile 5, validation 0.25, job change 3
- Credits deducted on valid results only, never on a miss
- Search is free in the app; the Search API is 1 credit a result on Essential and Growth, unmetered from Professional
A refund if your bounce rate passes 5%
Findymail verifies at the moment it finds, so you are not paying twice for the same address. It is the only provider here that puts a number on deliverability and refunds against it: above a 5% bounce rate, the credits come back.
- Under 5% bounce rate or the credits are refunded
- Duplicates found in the last 30 days cost nothing
- Mobile numbers are non-EU only, at 10 credits each
- API on every plan; usage-based plans include 1, 5 or 20 seats, credit plans are for reselling or embedding
Low entry for verified email, with rollover
Prospeo gets you to 2,000 verified emails a month for $49, tied with Hunter for the cheapest 2,000-email plan here on monthly billing, and unlike Hunter its unused credits roll into the next cycle rather than expiring. The trade is the shape of the product: email and phone, priced per user, and a mobile number costs ten times what an email does.
- 1 credit per verified email, 10 per direct mobile
- Unused credits roll over and stack on the next cycle's pack
- Annual billing delivers the full year of credits upfront
Hunter has been the default first API in this category for a decade, and the documentation shows it. Coverage is thinner than the newer waterfall tools, but nothing else here is as fast to get a working call out of.
- Domain Search returns every known address on a domain
- Free tier of 50 credits a month, enough to prototype against
- Annual billing drops Starter from $49 to $34 a month
Best waterfall without Clay
FullEnrich runs the same waterfall logic Clay does, but as a single API call with a single bill. If all you need is the waterfall and not the spreadsheet around it, this is that half of the trade on its own.
- Work email 1 credit, personal email 3, mobile 10
- Profile and company data free with any enrichment, 0.25 a credit on its own
- Landline results cost nothing, so you only pay for mobiles
Best for notified, DNC-screened contact data
Cognism sells a compliance posture as much as a dataset: it notifies the business contacts it holds within GDPR timeframes and scrubs its phone data against 15 Do Not Call and TPS registries. The API meters usage three separate ways, and the one that stops you first is usually not the one you budgeted for.
- Search tokens meter rows returned, credits meter contacts revealed
- 500 requests a minute per operation, each with its own window
- No published price. Two plans, both with 5 seats included
Best published credit costs for contact data
Lusha publishes what every operation costs to the credit: an email is 1, a phone number is 5, a recorded call is 8. What it does not publish is how fast you may ask for them. Rate limits are per plan across three windows and the numbers are an account manager conversation.
- An email costs 1 credit, a phone number costs 5
- Per-credit cost barely moves across tiers, $0.094 to $0.087, so volume buys seats not discounts
- Rate limits run per minute, hour and day, and are unpublished
Enterprise depth, now with a self-serve API
ZoomInfo is the incumbent most of these comparisons are really against, and it now sells two ways. The packages are still quoted, but GTM AI, its self-serve route, publishes a pay-as-you-go price for the API, MCP server and CLI: 1,000 data credits free, then $0.38 a data credit at the $1,000 spend tier. Search is free; enriching a record costs one credit.
- 1,000 data and 1,000 AI credits free, then top-ups from $20
- $0.38 a data credit at the $1,000 tier; search and lookup are free
- Mobile numbers and records under management are Enterprise only
API and MCP on the cheapest paid tier
RocketReach puts API and MCP access on every paid tier including the $33 one, and its per-export price genuinely falls with volume rather than staying flat. Exports are annual allowances rather than monthly credits, Essentials is email only, and the rate limits are published per plan.
- MCP and API access on all three paid plans
- 1,200 exports a year at $399, up to 20,000 at $1,699
- Per export: $0.33 on Essentials, $0.085 on Ultimate
Best for running LinkedIn automations from code
PhantomBuster runs Phantoms, prebuilt automations that extract and enrich from over 15 platforms, LinkedIn among them, through your own accounts. The API does not scrape anything itself: it launches an agent and reads what the agent produced, and the bill is execution hours, slots and email credits rather than requests.
- Plans meter execution time: 20, 80 or 300 hours a month
- No published request rate limit; slots cap how many Phantoms run at once
- Hosted MCP server with OAuth on every plan
LinkedIn URLs in, verified emails and mobiles out, paid per hit
Wiza sells its API apart from its seat plans: a prepaid balance of API credits at $0.025 each, from a $50 minimum, that anyone can buy without a subscription. A verified email costs 2 credits, a phone 5 and a profile 1, and nothing is charged when nothing is found. None of the individual seat plans, even the unlimited annual ones, lists API access.
- API credits at $0.025 each, 2,000 minimum for $50, no plan required
- 2 credits a verified email, 5 a phone, 1 a profile, 0 on a miss
- Async reveals: 15 requests a second, then 5 or 15+ running at once by API tier
Unlimited profile lookups for a team that starts from LinkedIn URLs
Reverse Contact sells person and company data two ways: credit packs from $100 for 5,000, or unlimited monthly plans priced by endpoint family. Go at $249 makes profile fetches from a social URL unlimited, Plus at $449 adds search and Max at $699 adds enrichment from an email, a name or a domain. Emails, phones and live refreshes stay on credits on every plan, and nothing is charged when nothing is found.
- Credit packs from $100 for 5,000, valid 3 months; 500 free credits, no card
- Unlimited plans from $249 a month, each one unlocking an endpoint family
- Hosted MCP server with 16 tools, OAuth or an API key, plus a CLI
Search wide for pennies of a credit, then pay only for the fields you keep
Crustdata prices every call in credits by what it returns: a search result is 0.03 credits and an empty search is free, a person profile is 1 credit and each contact field is an add-on on top. What it does not publish is what a credit costs in dollars. New accounts get $20 in credits, self-serve packs are priced in the dashboard, and enterprise plans start at four figures a month.
- Search at 0.03 credits a result, and a search that returns nothing is free
- Person enrich from 1 credit, up to 9 with every contact add-on
- $20 in free credits; the dollar rate of a credit is not on the public pages
- Hosted MCP server, and limits set per endpoint, from 10 to 30 requests a minute
Email finding with no contact database behind it, for GDPR-first teams
Dropcontact finds and verifies a work email from a name and a company without keeping a contact database: its pricing page says it works "exclusively with algorithms" on EU servers. A credit is spent only when a verified email comes back, and refunded when none does. It is priced in euros only, from €29 a month for 500 emails, and the API takes up to 250 contacts per asynchronous request.
- Pay on success: a credit only when a verified email is returned
- No contact database; built for GDPR, on EU servers
- Priced in euros, from €29 a month for 500 emails, API and MCP on every plan
- Up to 250 contacts per request, 60 requests a second
