PhantomBuster API review

What the API does, and what it spends

The v2 API is organized around agents, which are your configured Phantoms, and containers, which are their individual runs. The calls below are the ones a pipeline uses, with what each one draws from the plan.

Enrichment is metered separately. A Phantom that finds email addresses spends email credits, which PhantomBuster says are separate from execution time, so a run can be cheap in hours and dear in credits, or the reverse. Read both counters from the usage endpoints before and after a test run.

PhantomBuster API pricing, plan by plan

PhantomBuster API pricing is the plan, because the API is included and the plan meters what the API starts. Prices below are the monthly figure on annual billing, as the pricing page shows them.

An execution hour is not a number of profiles, so this directory does not model PhantomBuster by volume; how many rows an hour yields depends on the Phantom and the site. Per hour, the plans run $2.80 on Start, $1.60 on Grow and $1.17 on Scale, and the MCP server is listed on every one of them, the trial included.

Slots and hours, not requests

PhantomBuster API rate limits are not published as a request rate anywhere in the PhantomBuster API docs this directory read, and the plan explains why: the API mostly launches runs, and the runs are capped by slots and hours instead. What a GTM pipeline hits first is the number of Phantoms that can run at the same time.

In short, the PhantomBuster API rate limits a pipeline meets are slots and hours, and above both of them sits the account the Phantom runs as. A plan with 50 slots does not make it wise to run 50 LinkedIn automations on one profile at once.

How to create a PhantomBuster API key

The PhantomBuster API key lives in Workspace settings, reachable from the navbar menu, and PhantomBuster asks you to treat it as precious: anyone who has it can launch your agents. If it leaks, generate a new one and delete the old.

The two routes suit two jobs. A scheduled pipeline wants the key in a header and nothing else; an assistant building a lead list wants the MCP server, which never sees the key at all and cannot reach outside the workspace it was given.

A first PhantomBuster API call

Launch a Phantom you have already set up in the app, overriding one input for this run, then read what it produced. The paths are from PhantomBuster's v2 reference, and the agent ID is the one shown on the Phantom's page.

POST https://api.phantombuster.com/api/v2/agents/launch
# body: {"id": "<agent id>", "bonusArgument": {"spreadsheetUrl": "<new input>"}}

# when the run finishes:
# GET /api/v2/agents/fetch-output for that agent

Where the PhantomBuster API documentation lives

The PhantomBuster API documentation is on hub.phantombuster.com: developer guides under /docs and the v2 reference under /reference. The PhantomBuster API docs also publish an llms.txt index and Markdown versions of each page, which is the form to give an agent.

Note the URL drift before you build. The guide formats endpoints as phantombuster.com/api/v2, while the v2 reference declares its server as api.phantombuster.com/api/v2, and the header name differs between them too. Follow the reference, and test the key against one read-only call first.

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

PhantomBuster's own walkthrough of the API

PhantomBuster publishes this on its own channel, so it is PhantomBuster's account of PhantomBuster, not ours. It is here because a rate card cannot show you the thing moving, and a few minutes of the product is faster than any paragraph on this page at telling you whether the shape of it fits yours.

Seven minutes on the one call that matters most here: launching a Phantom with bonusArgument, so a new LinkedIn URL from n8n, a form or a webhook overrides one input for one run without rewriting the Phantom's saved settings, session cookie included. That is the same pattern the request section on this page uses. No price in it is used here.

Published 17 September 2025 on PhantomBuster, the channel PhantomBuster's own pages link to, and read on 23 October 2026. Nothing in it is a source for a price or a limit on this page: every figure in the tables above comes from a PhantomBuster page.

Strengths and limits

PhantomBuster is strongest as a launcher for automations that already work, and weakest as a data API in the usual sense.

Read together, PhantomBuster is an automation platform with an API on the side. The API is simple and well suited to triggering runs from n8n or a webhook; what those runs cost, and how hard they lean on your LinkedIn account, is decided by the Phantom.

Who should actually buy this

Buy PhantomBuster when a team already uses Phantoms in the app and wants them triggered by something else: a new row in a sheet, a form, a CRM event. The API turns a configured Phantom into one call, and bonusArgument makes it safe to feed new inputs without breaking it.

Start on the 14-day trial and run the exact Phantom you plan to use, then read the hours and email credits it spent. That ratio of rows to hours is the number that sizes a plan, and nobody can give it to you in advance.

Look elsewhere if you want rows priced per record, a published rate limit, or data that does not depend on your own account on the platform. A provider that sells the data outright is simpler to forecast and carries the account risk itself.

Before you build against it

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

If PhantomBuster is not the answer

Four providers in the Sourcing 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 PhantomBuster alternatives page.

PhantomBuster against the obvious rival

Same rate cards, read side by side, with the arithmetic done on a worked volume rather than left to you: Apify vs PhantomBuster. Every pairing in the directory is on the compare hub.