One of the few providers here 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 it is one of the few here whose license is written for you to redistribute enriched records inside a product you sell. That 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
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
Prospeo gets you to 2,000 verified emails a month for $49, which is the cheapest real entry point in this directory, and 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
Best hiring and tech signal
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
Best for turning sites into model input
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
Best search API for agents on a budget
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
Best for funding and company signal
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
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 is flat across tiers, so volume buys seats not discounts
- Rate limits run per minute, hour and day, and are unpublished
Best for unlimited mailboxes and warmup
Instantly splits the product in two and sells each half on its own: an Outreach plan with unlimited email accounts and unlimited warmup from $47 a month, and a Credits plan for the 450M contact database and waterfall enrichment. The bundles are the two added together.
- Unlimited email accounts and warmup on every Outreach plan
- Metered on uploaded contacts and emails, not mailboxes
- 100 requests a second and 6,000 a minute, per workspace
