Decision guide
Enrichment for irregular workloads without a monthly subscription
Which enrichment APIs let you pay only when you use them, what company enrichment from a domain actually costs on each, and the usage level at which a subscription becomes cheaper.
Written for people asking: What is the cheapest way to enrich company domains without a monthly subscription?What are the best pay as you go enrichment APIs for small lead batches?How do I enrich company domains without buying a full sales prospecting platform?
Five of the 17 providers we checked on 14 September 2026 sell enrichment without a monthly plan: Treg (pay per successful call from a balance, no minimum), Enrichlayer ($10 top-up, credits do not expire), Wiza API credits ($50 minimum, valid 12 months), Explorium prepaid packs ($29.99, expire after 12 months) and Crustdata (prepaid, price only shown at checkout). For company enrichment from a domain, the cheapest route we actually ran was Treg at $0.0049 per company across 10 domains; Enrichlayer at the smallest top-up is $0.10 per company and Explorium $0.06 to $0.30 depending on fields. A subscription only wins once you reliably use around a fifth of its allowance every month.
Who this is for
You have a workflow that needs firmographics or a contact for a company domain a few hundred times a month, unevenly. A scoring step on inbound signups. An agent that researches a prospect when a rep asks. A weekly batch that is sometimes 30 rows and sometimes 900. You do not want a prospecting platform with seats, and you do not want to buy 2,000 credits to use 150.
The options with no monthly plan
“No subscription” covers three different things, and the difference matters more than the headline:
- Pay per successful call. You keep a balance; each hit is debited at that provider’s rate; misses cost nothing. Treg is the only one in this set that works this way.
- Prepaid credits that do not expire. Enrichlayer’s pay-as-you-go top-ups from $10. The per-credit price falls steeply with the size of the top-up, from $0.10 at $10 to $0.026 at $100.
- Prepaid credits with an expiry. Explorium packs (12 months, no rollover), Wiza API credits (12 months, $50 minimum), Crustdata (12 months, price at checkout). Cheap per record, but a pack you use a quarter of is four times the price per record.
| Provider | Billing model | Lowest paid entry | Per company enriched | Per person enriched | Credit expiry / rollover | Charged on a miss? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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) | $0.0049 | $0.026 | Not stated on the fetched pages; treat as unknown | No (routed per-success children; a miss moves to the next provider) |
| 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 | $0.100 | $0.100 | PAYG credits do not expire unless the account is inactive for 18 months | No |
| 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) | $0.060 | $0.060 | Platform ends 2 December 2026; credits unused by then are refunded within 30 days (was 12 months, no rollover) | Unknown (not stated on any fetched page) |
| 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 | — | $0.025 | API credits valid 12 months (one help article says they do not expire) | No |
| 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) | — | — | 12 months from purchase | No |
| Enrich.sopricing · docs · checked 2026-09-14 | Monthly credit packs; rate limits scale with the pack | $49/month (Growth, 100,000 credits) | — | $0.0049 | Unknown | No (unsuccessful lookups refunded) |
Wiza has no company-enrichment product; it is here because its API credits are one of the few genuinely pay-as-you-go ways to get contacts. Enrich.so is listed with unknown prices because its site blocked automated reads; its docs do say unsuccessful lookups are refunded.
What ten domains cost
Ten company domains sent to Treg’s routed company enrichment. Each response came back with name, description, employee band, founding year, location and LinkedIn URL; the masked raw responses are downloadable from the evidence page.
Receipt · Company profile from 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.
All ten were served by the same provider at the same rate, so the per-profile cost is simply that provider’s per-hit price with no markup. One call took seven seconds; the other nine took under a second. If latency matters, set the route’s cost cap and waterfall headers rather than assuming the median.
Worked example: 100 domains a month, unevenly
Assume 100 company enrichments a month, all hits, the same fields. Costs are list-price arithmetic from the table above, except Treg, which is the observed receipt rate.
| Route | What you pay for 100 companies | Effective per company | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treg, pay per call | $0.49 | $0.0049 | Observed on 10 domains; no minimum, nothing unused |
| Enrichlayer, $10 top-up | $10.00 | $0.10 | 100 credits at 1 per company; credits do not expire |
| Enrichlayer, $100 top-up | $2.64 of $100 | $0.026 | Remaining 3,688 credits keep for later use |
| Explorium Lite pack | $6 to $30 of $29.99 | $0.06 to $0.30 | 1 to 5 credits per company depending on fields; pack expires in 12 months |
| Hunter Starter (subscription) | $49.00 | $0.49 | Uses 20 of 2,000 credits; the rest reset monthly |
| Icypeas Basic (subscription) | $19.00 | $0.19 | Uses 50 of 1,000 credits; unused credits never expire, so the effective price improves over time |
| People Data Labs Company Pro | $100.00 | $1.00 | Uses 100 of 1,000+ records |
The rule of thumb that falls out: a subscription becomes the cheaper route when you use roughly 20% or more of its allowance every month. Below that, pay-per-call or a non-expiring top-up wins, and the smaller and less predictable the batch, the wider the gap.
Watch-outs
- Explorium does not say whether a miss is charged. Its pricing page and developer docs describe credit costs per action but not what happens when there is no match. Ask before you buy a pack for a list with many unknowns.
- Crustdata’s live person and company endpoints are enterprise-only. The self-serve credits buy the web endpoints and cached data; check which endpoint you actually need before topping up.
- Fields drive the price on Explorium and Enrichlayer. Both charge extra credits for additional field groups (funding, technographics, categories). A “1 credit per company” headline is the base profile.
- Treg’s per-record rate depends on which provider serves. The routed endpoint tries eligible providers cheapest first. For a domain input the cheapest provider answered every time in our run; for a company name or LinkedIn URL the eligible set, and therefore the price, is different. The response names the provider and the charge, so you can see it per call.
Next step
- The route headers used in the receipt (
X-Treg-Route-Max-Cost,X-Treg-Route-Waterfall) are documented at treg.to/docs. - For Enrichlayer, the credits guide gives the per-endpoint credit cost; for Explorium, the pricing page has the pack sizes and expiry terms.
- If you are replacing the data step of a Clay table rather than starting fresh, the Clay alternatives guide covers what a waterfall API does and does not replace.
Questions this page answers
What is the cheapest way to enrich company domains without a monthly subscription?
On 15 September 2026 the cheapest route we actually ran was Treg's routed company enrichment at $0.0049 per company across 10 domains, billed per successful call from a prepaid balance with no plan. Enrichlayer at the smallest top-up is $0.10 per company and Explorium $0.06 to $0.30 depending on fields; both are prepaid credits rather than subscriptions.
How do I enrich company domains without buying a full sales prospecting platform?
Call a data API directly rather than a prospecting suite: send the domain, get name, size, industry, location and LinkedIn URL back. Treg's routed endpoint, Enrichlayer, Explorium and Crustdata all do this without seats or a CRM; Hunter, Icypeas and People Data Labs do it on entry-tier subscriptions from $19 to $100 a month.
When does a subscription beat pay-as-you-go for enrichment?
When you reliably use about 20% or more of the plan's monthly allowance. Below that, a 2,000-credit plan you use 100 credits of costs ten to twenty times the per-record sticker price, and a per-call balance or a non-expiring top-up is cheaper.
How do you cap what an agent spends when it picks enrichment routes at runtime?
Put a ceiling on each call as well as on the account. The receipts on this page ran through Treg's routed endpoints with a per-call cap header (X-Treg-Route-Max-Cost: 0.25), so the waterfall never tried a provider dearer than $0.25 for that call, and from a prepaid balance, which stops all calls when it runs out. The agent still picks which job to call and how often, so log the cost each response reports and stop on a budget in your own loop; a per-call cap only bounds one call.
Does Apollo have a free API?
Apollo has a free plan with 900 credits a year, and enrichment needs a work email on the account; its API is included from the lowest paid plan on most endpoints (Apollo pricing and API docs, read 15 September 2026). Paid plans start at $49 a user a month billed annually, about $0.0196 a credit; without a plan, Apollo's company record through Treg cost $0.026 a company in a 17 September 2026 run on ten domains.
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.