Decision guide
Choose a contact enrichment API for an AI agent or growth team
Seventeen enrichment APIs compared on the terms that decide the bill for small, irregular batches: billing shape, minimum spend, cost per found email, whether misses are charged and whether the entry plan includes the API.
Written for people asking: What are the best contact enrichment APIs for an AI agent platform?What are the best pay as you go enrichment APIs for small lead batches?Which enrichment APIs report match quality and costs for every lookup?
For an agent that enriches contacts in small, irregular batches, choose on billing shape before data quality: pay only on a hit, no monthly minimum, API included on the entry plan. Of the 17 providers checked on 14 September 2026, four sell that way with no subscription at all (Treg, Enrichlayer, Wiza API credits, Explorium prepaid packs). Subscription APIs from $15 to $99 a month (BetterContact, Icypeas, Hunter, Findymail, Prospeo) work out at $0.02 to $0.08 per found email, but only if you use most of the allowance. Lusha is the one API here that bills a credit even when nothing comes back. in a 10-contact fixture it returned 10 work emails for $0.054 in total.
Decide the billing shape before the data source
An agent does not enrich 2,000 contacts on the first of the month. It enriches 12 on Tuesday, none on Wednesday and 300 on Friday when a list lands. That usage pattern is what most enrichment pricing is designed against. A $49 plan with 2,000 credits is $0.0245 per email on paper; if the agent uses 200 credits that month, it is $0.245 per email, ten times the sticker figure, and the rest of the credits either expire or roll over with a cap.
So the first cut is not “who has the best data”. It is:
- Is there a monthly minimum? Subscription, prepaid pack, or true pay-per-call.
- Are misses charged? An agent asking about unknown people will miss often. A provider that bills on the request rather than the hit is charging you for its own gaps.
- Is the API on the entry plan? Several vendors sell the cheap plan for humans clicking in a browser and gate the API behind a higher tier or an add-on.
- Do unused credits expire? Prepaid packs and annual credits usually do.
Only after those four does the per-record price matter, and only then does data coverage, which this page cannot measure for you (see the last section).
All 17 providers on those four terms
Each row links to the pricing and docs page the figures were read from, with the date. “Per email found” is the entry paid tier divided by its credits, times the credits one found email costs. It is a list-price arithmetic, not an observed cost. A dash means the vendor does not sell that unit or does not publish enough to compute it.
| Provider | Billing model | Lowest paid entry | Per email found (entry tier) | Charged on a miss? | API on lowest plan? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Treg (routed endpoints)pricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Pay per successful call from a prepaid USD balance; no plan | None (prepaid balance, top up any amount) | $0.0054 | No (routed per-success children; a miss moves to the next provider) | Yes (API, CLI and MCP) |
| Enrichlayerpricing · docs · checked 2026-09-23 | Pay-as-you-go top-ups, or annual subscription with 12-month commitment | None for PAYG ($10 buys 100 credits); Starter subscription $588/year | $0.300 | No | Yes (API-only product) |
| Wizapricing · docs · checked 2026-11-04 | Subscription per user, or prepaid API credits at $0.025 each | $49/user/month app plan, or $50 one-off for 2,000 API credits | $0.050 | No | No as a plan feature (Team plan); yes via one-off API credits |
| Exploriumpricing · docs · checked 2026-09-17 | Prepaid credit packages, not auto-renewed | Closing: AgentSource ends 2 December 2026; pricing page gone (was $29.99 one-time, Lite, 500 credits) | — | Unknown (not stated on any fetched page) | Yes (API key issued with any package) |
| Crustdatapricing · docs · checked 2026-11-04 | Prepaid credits bought in the dashboard, with optional auto top-up | Unknown (package prices only inside the logged-in checkout) | — | No | Partly (self-serve in-DB search and enrich plus web endpoints; person and company live endpoints are enterprise-only) |
| Enrich.sopricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Monthly credit packs; rate limits scale with the pack | $49/month (Growth, 100,000 credits) | $0.0049 | No (unsuccessful lookups refunded) | Unknown |
| BetterContactpricing · docs · checked 2026-11-04 | Subscription with monthly credits and capped rollover | $15/month (Starter, 200 credits) | $0.075 | No | Yes (API & integrations listed on Starter) |
| Icypeaspricing · docs · checked 2026-11-11 | Subscription with credits that never expire | $19/month (Basic, 1,000 credits) or $190/year, plus VAT | $0.019 | No for finders; verification is 0.1 credit per address tested | Yes (API and MCP on Basic) |
| Hunterpricing · docs · checked 2026-10-14 | Subscription with monthly credits; separate prepaid Data Platform for API-only use | $49/month (Starter, 2,000 credits) or $34/month annual | $0.025 | No | Yes (all plans) |
| Findymailpricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Subscription with monthly finder credits plus bonus verifier credits | $99/month (Starter, 5,000 finder + 5,000 verifier credits) | $0.020 | No for finder endpoints; verifier charges 1 credit per attempt | Yes (all plans) |
| Prospeopricing · docs · checked 2026-10-07 | Subscription per user with monthly credits, pooled per team | $49/user/month (Starter, 2,000 credits) or $37/user/month annual | $0.025 | No | Yes on Starter (5 req/s, 2,000/day) |
| Apollo.iopricing · docs · checked 2026-10-14 | Subscription per user with an annual credit pool; API draws credits | $49/user/month billed annually (Basic) | $0.020 | No (people enrichment); organisation enrichment not stated | Docs charge credits per call on any plan; the pricing page FAQ (read 2026-10-29) says API access is available on Custom plans |
| FullEnrichpricing · docs · checked 2026-10-14 | Subscription with monthly credits; charged only on found data | $55/month (Pro, 1,000 credits) | $0.055 | No | Yes |
| Lushapricing · docs · checked 2026-10-07 | Subscription with monthly credits | $49.90/month (Starter, 400 credits) or $37.45/month annual | $0.250 | Yes via API (minimum 1 credit per request even with no data) | Yes, every plan including Free (every user gets their own API key) |
| Dropcontactpricing · docs · checked 2026-11-11 | Subscription with monthly or annual email quota; pay on success | €29/month (Starter, 500 credits) or €24/month billed annually (6,000 credits/year) | €0.058 | No (credit refunded if no email is found); verification-only requests do consume a credit | Yes (API and MCP on Starter) |
| People Data Labspricing · docs · checked 2026-10-07 | Subscription with monthly credits; 1 credit per successful match | $98/month (Person Pro) or $100/month (Company Pro) | — | No | Yes (free plan includes an API key) |
| Claypricing · docs · checked 2026-11-04 | Subscription with Actions and Data Credits; credits buy third-party data | $167/month (Launch) or $54/month billed annually | $0.028 | No | No (HTTP API integrations listed from Growth at $446/month; developer platform read-only on lower plans) |
| HubSpot Breeze Intelligence (ex-Clearbit)pricing · docs · checked 2026-11-11 | Bundled into paid HubSpot tiers; enrichment does not consume HubSpot Credits | A paid HubSpot subscription (Starter or above); price not on fetched pages | — | Unknown | Unknown (no enrichment endpoint found on developers.hubspot.com) |
Three things the table flattens:
- “No” on misses is not always the whole story. Findymail, Icypeas and Dropcontact do not charge when the finder returns nothing, but their verifiers bill per address tested. If your pipeline finds then verifies, the verification step is where misses cost money. Hunter’s verifier is 0.5 credit per call. Treg’s routed verify endpoint is currently served by a provider that does not meter it, so it was $0 in our run; that is a commercial term that can change.
- Lusha’s API adds a request credit. One email is 1 credit, plus 1 credit for the request, plus a minimum of 1 credit even when nothing is returned. On the Starter plan that is $0.25 per email, double what the credit price suggests.
- Two vendors could not be priced honestly. Enrich.so’s pricing page returned HTTP 429 to every plain fetch, and Crustdata only shows package prices inside the logged-in checkout. Their credit-per-record rules are public and shown; their dollar figures are marked unknown rather than copied from third-party blogs.
What ten real lookups cost
Ten public-company executives, name plus company domain, sent to Treg’s routed email finder and then to its routed person enrichment. The runner script, fixture and masked responses are on the evidence page.
Receipt · Work email from name + domain · 2026-09-14
Run from a Treg account on 2026-09-14 with a $0.25 per-call route cap. Latency is wall-clock from the CLI, including network. Cost is what the account was billed, read from the response. Ten inputs is a fixture, not a benchmark: it shows the mechanics and the order of magnitude, not a hit rate you should plan on.Download the call log (each receipt is linked from the evidence page) or re-run the fixture.
Four of the ten calls missed on the first provider and were served by the second. Those first misses were free because the providers in question bill per hit, which is the practical difference between a routed call and a single-vendor call: you pay for the provider that answered, not for the ones that did not.
Receipt · Person profile from name + domain · 2026-09-14
Run from a Treg account on 2026-09-14 with a $0.25 per-call route cap. Latency is wall-clock from the CLI, including network. Cost is what the account was billed, read from the response. Ten inputs is a fixture, not a benchmark: it shows the mechanics and the order of magnitude, not a hit rate you should plan on.Download the call log (each receipt is linked from the evidence page) or re-run the fixture.
Person enrichment was five times the price of the email find because a single provider served all ten. Treg’s routing tries the cheapest eligible provider first, so if the input shape only matches one provider, you pay that provider’s rate. If you only need the email, do not call enrich.
Who each option fits
- A coding agent or an internal tool with bursty usage: Treg, Enrichlayer or Wiza API credits. No plan, nothing to cancel. Treg is the only one of the three that routes across providers on a miss; Enrichlayer credits never expire; Wiza’s are valid 12 months.
- A growth team that already runs a monthly list of a few thousand: Hunter, Findymail or Prospeo. The allowance gets used, the API is on the entry plan, and each has its own verifier.
- The smallest possible monthly commitment: BetterContact at $15 or Icypeas at $19. Check the BetterContact API add-on; on Starter it costs more than the plan.
- You want the vendor to run the waterfall for you: BetterContact, FullEnrich or Treg. See the Clay alternatives guide for how their charging differs.
- You need company profiles more than emails: the no-subscription guide has the company-domain receipt and worked example.
- You already pay for HubSpot: Breeze Intelligence is bundled and there is no per-record price. It is not a standalone API for an agent.
What this page cannot tell you
Ten hits out of ten on well-known CEOs says nothing about your list. Coverage on ordinary contacts is far lower and varies by provider and region. The only public signal we have is the observed hit rate Treg reports across all of its users’ calls to each underlying provider, which reflects everyone’s input quality, not a clean benchmark:
| Provider finder (via Treg) | Observed hit rate | Sample size |
|---|---|---|
| Kitt | 40% | 83,237 |
| Findymail | 39% | 87,976 |
| Tomba | 35% | 74,748 |
| QuickEnrich | 29% | 68,556 |
| Hunter | 25% | 80,956 |
| LeadsForge | 14% | 146,327 |
| LeadMagic | 3% | 105,564 |
Source: Treg catalog observed.hit_rate fields, read 14 September 2026. LeadMagic’s figure is dominated by a deliberately unmatchable test input Treg uses for monitoring, so it is not comparable. Treat the rest as an order of magnitude: expect a third of unknown contacts to come back with an email from any single provider, and plan the waterfall or the budget accordingly.
Next step
- Run your own 10-contact fixture before committing to a plan. The runner script works with any Treg account and costs cents.
- The route headers used in the receipts (
X-Treg-Route-Max-Cost) are documented at treg.to/docs. - For a single provider, start from the docs linked in the table; every one of the subscription vendors offers a free credit allowance large enough to test ten contacts.
Questions this page answers
What are the best contact enrichment APIs for an AI agent platform?
For an agent making irregular calls, the routes that charge only on a hit with no monthly minimum are the fit: Treg's routed people endpoints (Treg, one credential, pay per successful call), Enrichlayer top-ups, and Wiza API credits. Subscription APIs such as Hunter, Findymail, Icypeas and Prospeo cost $0.02 to $0.08 per found email only if you use most of the allowance.
What are the best pay as you go enrichment APIs for small lead batches?
Four of the 17 providers checked on 14 September 2026 sell without a subscription: Treg (per successful call from a balance), Enrichlayer ($10 top-up, credits do not expire), Wiza API credits ($50 minimum, valid 12 months) and Explorium packs ($29.99, expire in 12 months). On a 10-contact fixture Treg returned 10 work emails for $0.054 in total.
Which enrichment APIs report match quality and costs for every lookup?
Treg's routed responses name the provider that served, every provider tried, the outcome and the charge on each call, and its catalog publishes observed hit rates per provider (25% to 40% for single finders across all users). Direct providers return a confidence score (Hunter, Tomba) but not a per-call charge; Lusha bills a credit per API request even when nothing is returned.
What are some examples of data enrichment?
Contact enrichment turns a name and a company domain into a work email, title or phone: on a 10-contact fixture on 14 September 2026, 10 work emails came back for $0.054 in total. Company enrichment turns a domain into headcount, industry, country, revenue, funding and tech stack: on ten domains on 17 September 2026, Apollo filled all of them, funding on 8 of 10, for $0.026 a company (see the company enrichment page).
Does Apollo have a free plan, and does its API come with it?
Apollo has a Free plan, and whether the API comes with it depends on which Apollo page you read. On 14 October 2026 Apollo's plan comparison listed Free at 900 credits a year and Basic at $49 a user a month billed annually with 30,000 credits a year; the monthly-billing price is not shown. Apollo's API pricing docs (updated 7 October 2026) charge credits per call on any plan, 1 credit for a person's email or demographics plus 8 if a mobile number comes back, and only when data is found, with rate limits set by plan; the pricing page's own FAQ, read on 29 October 2026, says API access is available on Custom plans, so confirm API access on Free or Basic with Apollo before building on it. Unused credits, plan-included and purchased add-ons alike, expire at the end of each billing cycle and do not roll over.
Is there another app like Apollo with an API?
Yes, but most replace only one part of it. Apollo bundles a contact database, email finding and sequencing in one per-user subscription, and its pricing page FAQ (read 29 October 2026) says API access is on Custom plans. For finding and enriching contacts from code, the providers on this page sell the API without that bundle: Enrichlayer (pay-as-you-go top-ups), Wiza (prepaid API credits at $0.025 each) and Explorium (prepaid packs, an API key with any package) need no subscription; Hunter, Findymail, Icypeas, Prospeo and BetterContact include the API on their entry subscription (published terms, 14 September 2026). None of them sends the sequences; that stays a separate tool. The table above compares all 17 on billing, minimum spend, charge on a miss and API access.
Relationship: the people who run this site also work on Treg, one of the routes compared on this page. Every Treg figure here is a call we paid for, with the raw response downloadable, and the same fixture is run against the alternatives where their terms allow.
Spotted an error or a changed price? Email corrections@enrichmentapiguide.com with the page URL and a source. Corrections are logged on the corrections page.