Signal APIs, and why hiring beats intent

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

The clearest rate card in this directory. Every operation has a stated credit cost, credits come off only when a lookup succeeds, and search itself spends nothing on plans that include it. 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
• People, company and jobs search spends no credits from Essential up

Job postings are the cheapest honest intent signal in B2B, because a company hiring three SDRs has already decided to spend. TheirStack sells that as rows rather than as a dashboard, and the credits roll over for a year.

• One-time packs from $109 for 1,000 company credits
• Monthly subscription from $49 for 1,500 API credits
• Unused one-time credits roll over for 12 months

Exa is what you reach for when the signal you need is not in anybody's database yet. It returns clean page content rather than links, which is the difference between an agent that can answer a research question and one that hands you ten tabs.

• Search from $4 per 1,000 requests on Lite and $7 on the default auto mode, up to 10 results each
• Contact enrichment at $0.02 per email, $0.07 per phone
• Research endpoint tiers from $0.012 to $1.00 per request

Firecrawl takes a URL and gives you back the page as Markdown, with the navigation, the cookie banner and the JavaScript already dealt with. It is the layer most GTM agents are missing: not a database of companies, but the ability to read any company's own site.

• 1 credit a page scraped, 2 a search, from $0.00083 a credit at volume
• Free plan runs 1,000 credits a month with no card
• Concurrent browsers, not the request rate, is the real ceiling

Tavily is a search API built for language models rather than for people, and priced simply enough that you can model it on a napkin: one credit a basic search, two for a deep one, $0.008 a credit. The free tier is 1,000 credits a month with no card.

• 1 credit a basic search, 2 for advanced, at $0.008 a credit
• 1,000 free credits a month, reset on the 1st, no card
• Development keys run 100 requests a minute, production keys 1,000

Crunchbase is where most teams look first for funding rounds, headcount and company history, and the API serves the same data that powers the site. Like Cognism and Salesloft, it publishes no rate card at all, and it withdrew its free Basic tier, so access now starts with a sales call.

• No published pricing. Access is quoted, through sales or your CSM
• The free Basic API is closed: existing keys work, new ones are not issued
• 200 calls a minute across every endpoint

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

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 is flat across tiers, so volume buys seats not discounts
• Rate limits run per minute, hour and day, and are unpublished