Outreach API review
A 42-tool MCP server behind OAuth 2.1 and dynamic client registration
GET https://api.outreach.io/api/v2/prospects?page[limit]=50 Authorization: Bearer $OUTREACH_TOKEN Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json # 10,000 requests an hour, per user # page[limit] caps at 1,000; offsets stop at 10,000
The Outreach API is the opposite of a sender's API in every commercial respect. Outreach publishes no price: its pricing page names four Amplify packages and their AI credit allowances and then asks you to request pricing, with seats priced per user and AI work metered in credits on top. On the "who charges extra for the API" question the honest answer is that nobody outside a sales call can tell you.
The engineering is a different story, and better documented than its reputation. The REST API implements JSON API 1.0 behind OAuth 2.0, it is limited to 10,000 requests an hour per user with rate limit headers on every response, and the Core, Plus and Pro packages list 250,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 API calls. There is also an S2S route for server jobs, signed with your own key pair rather than a user login.
Then there is the MCP server, which is the strongest reason an engineer would choose Outreach. It exposes 42 tools behind OAuth 2.1 with PKCE and dynamic client registration, 27 of them for reading and discovery and 13 for writes, and every Amplify package lists "Outreach MCP (Server & Client)". Reply.io's 70-tool server and Amplemarket's, at more than 50, are larger in sending, and Reply.io's signs in with an API key rather than OAuth.
The rest of the category is in the Sending APIs listing.
What the four packages publish
Outreach puts the allowances on its pricing page and leaves the prices off. Every package is per user with no platform fee, and each one names an AI credit allowance.
| Package | AI credits | API calls | Custom objects | Knowledge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amplify Essentials | 10,000 | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed |
| Amplify Core | 25,000 | 250,000 | 5 | 500 MB |
| Amplify Plus | 50,000 | 500,000 | 10 | 750 MB |
| Amplify Pro | 100,000 | 1,000,000 | 20 | 1,500 MB |
The pricing page does not say what period the credit or API call allowances cover, so this page does not add one. Credits are deducted per AI action at a predefined cost, extra credit packs can be bought at any time, and the add-ons listed are Data Sharing, Connectors, Additional Instances and Listener Licenses.
An allowance of 500,000 API calls means something very different by the month and by the year. Against a per-user limit of 10,000 an hour, a busy integration user could reach it within days. Get the period, and what happens past it, on the quote before you size anything against it.
Outreach API pricing, plan by plan
Outreach API pricing cannot be reported here, because Outreach publishes no price for any package, seat or credit pack.
| What you might want to know | What Outreach publishes |
|---|---|
| Price per seat | Not published, per user with no platform fee |
| Package names and AI credits | Published: 10,000 to 100,000 |
| API calls per package | Published on three of four, with no period |
| Whether API access costs extra | Not stated |
| Free tier or trial | Not published |
| Rate limit | 10,000 requests an hour per user |
Where a vendor publishes no rate, this directory says so rather than estimating, and any Outreach figure found on a comparison site is somebody's quote. What the table does show is that Outreach is transparent about allowances and silent about money, which is the reverse of most senders here.
The part you can plan before a contract is technical: the hourly limit per integration user, the OAuth app or S2S setup, and whether Data Sharing makes paging unnecessary. That work stays valid whatever the quote says.
Per user, by the hour
Outreach API rate limits are 10,000 requests an hour for each user, with special rules for the bulk API and for Kaia recordings. Outreach reserves the right to adjust limits at any time, and says so.
| Scope | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| General API | 10,000 an hour | Per user. |
| Kaia recordings and transcripts | 3 a second, 6,000 a day | Per organization. |
| Access token requests | 1 a minute | Per user; faster returns 429. |
| Page size | 1,000 | The maximum page[limit]. |
| Offset | 10,000 | Larger offsets are refused for performance. |
Reading your position
Three headers on every response.
- X-RateLimit-Limit: the requests allowed in the period.
- X-RateLimit-Remaining: what is left.
- X-RateLimit-Reset, aliased as Retry-After: when the counter resets.
- Past the limit you get a 429 with a rateLimitExceeded error.
Working within it
Filter and page by ID, not by offset.
- The 10,000 offset ceiling means large backfills page across ID ranges or narrower filters.
- Count queries are throttled under load, so do not count before every page.
- Maintenance returns 503 with a Retry-After date, announced at status.outreach.io.
- Data Sharing to Snowflake or Delta Sharing is the route for warehouse-scale reads.
Ten thousand an hour is about 167 a minute for one integration user, which is modest beside the senders here and comfortable for a CRM-style sync. Because it is per user, the integration user is the thing to plan: one dedicated user for the sync keeps a rep's own tools from spending its hour.
How to create an Outreach API key
There is no Outreach API key. Every integration authenticates through OAuth 2.0 with scoped tokens, or, for server jobs, through an S2S token issued to your app for an organization that has installed it. Outreach registers both through its developer portal.
OAuth 2.0
The default, and the only route for user actions.
- Access tokens last 2 hours and refresh tokens 14 days; each refresh issues a new refresh token.
- A user and app pair can hold at most 100 refresh tokens at once.
- Scopes are resource.read, write, delete or all, and they are not additive: write does not grant read.
- A missing scope or a governance rule returns 403 with a descriptive error.
S2S for server jobs
An app token, not a user login.
- Add API Access (S2S) to your app, choose scopes and upload a public key.
- Sign an app token with your private key, exchange it for an install-specific S2S token.
- The S2S token lasts one hour, with no refresh: request a new one.
- It carries no user identity, so reads work well and some writes need an authorizer user or will not work.
OAuth is the default for anything a person or a distributed app does, and S2S is the narrower route for a headless job that should not depend on somebody's login. Neither is an afternoon's setup, so budget the app registration before the first useful request.
A minimal call
Every request carries the JSON API media type as well as the bearer token; leave the Content-Type off and Outreach answers with an unsupportedMediaType error. Filtering uses JSON API query parameters.
GET https://api.outreach.io/api/v2/prospects?filter[firstName]=Sally Authorization: Bearer $OUTREACH_TOKEN Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json # relationships come back as resource identifiers # or as links you follow with a second request
Where the Outreach API documentation lives
The Outreach API documentation is at developers.outreach.io, a developer portal covering the REST API, the MCP server, Data Sharing and client extensions. Getting started carries the token lifetimes, scopes and the rate limit, and making requests carries the JSON API rules.
| Surface | Where | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | developers.outreach.io/api/getting-started | OAuth, scopes, maintenance and the 10,000 an hour limit. |
| S2S access | developers.outreach.io/api/s2s-access | App tokens, install IDs and the scopes S2S supports. |
| Making requests | developers.outreach.io/api/making-requests | JSON API format, filters, sorting and pagination. |
| MCP server | developers.outreach.io/mcp-server | The 42 tools, OAuth 2.1 and tool annotations. |
| Data Sharing | developers.outreach.io/data-sharing | Snowflake and Delta Sharing exports. |
The portal is thorough on mechanics and practical about them: it tells you to reuse an access token until it expires, to keep refresh tokens short-lived, and to page across ID ranges rather than deep offsets. It also documents its MCP tools with annotations that say which ones read, which ones write and which ones are destructive.
The MCP page lists Outreach's MCP access alongside the others in this directory.
Outreach 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.
We have not found a walkthrough of the API on Outreach's own channel yet. None of Outreach's own pages that this directory captured link to a YouTube channel, so there is no channel it can prove is Outreach's to read. When Outreach publishes one, or sends us one, it goes here.
A vendor video is the vendor's claim about itself, which is why it sits in its own section.
Strengths and limits
Outreach documents its engineering in full and its commercial terms not at all.
What it does well
- A published limit of 10,000 requests an hour per user, with three headers.
- An MCP server with 42 tools, OAuth 2.1, PKCE and dynamic client registration.
- MCP on every Amplify package, not only the top one.
- An S2S route for server jobs that do not belong to a user.
- API call, custom object and knowledge allowances published per package.
- Warehouse export through Snowflake or Delta Sharing as an add-on.
Where it falls short
- No published price for any package, seat or credit pack.
- No API key; every integration needs an OAuth app or S2S setup.
- The allowances have no stated period.
- Offsets stop at 10,000, so large backfills need ID-range paging.
- Access tokens can only be fetched once a minute per user.
- Outreach can change rate limits at any time.
The trade is clear on both panels. If you are building against Outreach, it gives you more than most sending platforms here, including a 42-tool MCP server behind OAuth 2.1. If you are choosing it, you are choosing a quote, and nothing on this page can tell you what it is.
Who should build on Outreach
Outreach is bought by sales leaders, and this page is mostly for the engineer handed the integration afterwards. The good news is real: the API is standard JSON API, the limits and headers are published, there is a proper server route in S2S, and the MCP server carries 42 tools behind OAuth 2.1 with dynamic client registration.
Plan around three things before writing code. Use a dedicated integration user so the 10,000 an hour is yours, register the OAuth app or S2S access first because everything waits on it, and design the backfill around filters and ID ranges because offsets stop at 10,000.
If you are still choosing, the decision is not technical. Outreach publishes package names and allowances and no money, so the comparison against a sender with a rate card has to happen on a quote, and the allowance periods are the first thing to get in writing.
Before you build against it
Four things to settle first, each one read off Outreach's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. These are the fields it returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outreach | Work email, Mobile phone, CRM records | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
Outreach states no 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. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And the vendor 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 Outreach is not the answer
Three providers in the Sending APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.
Reply.io
$49/user/mo annualThe same multichannel job with a published price, the API on every plan and a trial that includes it.
Salesloft
Quote onlyThe same enterprise shape and the same sales conversation. The right comparison if the platform is the point and the quote is the problem.
Instantly
$47/moIf the platform was never used and the job is sending, this is $47 a month and 100 requests a second.
The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the Outreach alternatives page.
Outreach against the obvious rival
Same rate cards, read side by side, with the arithmetic done on a worked volume rather than left to you: Instantly vs Outreach, Outreach vs Salesloft and lemlist vs Outreach. Every pairing in the directory is on the compare hub.
Instantly vs Outreach
CompareA $47 card payment against a quote, and a 42-tool MCP server sits on the expensive side.
Outreach vs Salesloft
CompareTwo quote-only revenue platforms. One publishes an MCP server with 42 tools, the other publishes what every endpoint costs.
lemlist vs Outreach
CompareBoth ship an MCP server. One sells it on a $55 plan you can buy today, the other inside a quote.
Calling these APIs one by one? Run them from one Clay table.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Nothing worth quoting yet
We searched Reddit for threads about the Outreach API and have found none worth quoting yet. When one turns up, it goes here, and nothing on this page leans on an unquoted paraphrase.
Outreach API, answered
Is the Outreach API free?
No free tier and no published trial.
How much does the Outreach API cost?
Outreach publishes no dollar price on its public pages, so entry is whatever sales quotes you. It bills per seat, by credit pack. Read from Outreach's own pricing page on 24 October 2026.
What are the Outreach API rate limits?
10,000 requests an hour per user. Page size caps at 1,000 and offset at 10,000.
How do I get an Outreach API key?
There is no Outreach API key. Requests authenticate with OAuth 2.0 with scoped tokens, or an S2S app token for server jobs. No API key option. The current steps are in Outreach's own documentation, which is authoritative on anything that has changed since 24 October 2026.
Does Outreach have an MCP server?
Yes. Hosted, 42 tools, OAuth 2.1 with DCR. It is listed with the others on the MCP page.