Workflow

The cheapest way to find and verify work emails for 100 leads

Find-then-verify for a one-off list of 100 names plus company domains, costed four ways: a pay-per-call receipt scaled to 100, and the entry tiers of Icypeas, Hunter, Prospeo and Findymail with their free allowances, all from the vendors' own pages.

Written for people asking: What is the cheapest way to find and verify work emails for 100 leads?How much does it cost to find and verify 100 work emails through an API?Which email finder and verifier should I use for a small one-off lead list?

The job, precisely

You have 100 leads as a name and a company domain. You want a work email for each, and you want to know before you send whether the address will bounce. You do not have a subscription and you may not need one again next month. This page costs that job four ways from evidence you can check: a receipt for the two calls on 10 real leads, and the published terms of the four finder-plus-verifier subscriptions with an entry tier under $100.

Two things about the job shape decide the bill:

1. Finding is billed per hit on every option here; verifying is billed per address tested on most. So misses are cheap, but the verify step charges you for addresses that turn out to be catch-all or dead.
2. A one-off batch pays for a whole month on a subscription. The credits you use are worth a couple of dollars at list price; the cash you hand over is the plan price, unless the free allowance covers the batch or the credits keep.

The four subscriptions and the pay-per-call option

Terms as read from each vendor’s pricing and docs pages on 14 September 2026. “Per email found” and “per verification” are the entry plan price divided by its credits, times the credits one action costs.

What 100 leads cost on each

Two scenarios, because the hit rate on your list is the number this page cannot know. All found is the ceiling and matches our fixture of well-known executives. 40 found is the highest single-provider hit rate Treg reports across all of its users’ finder calls (see the contact enrichment guide for the table); ordinary lists land there or lower. Every found address is verified once.

How the Treg estimate is built: finding cost $0.006944 per address in the receipt below, including one first-try miss that was billed; verifying cost $0.00178 for a definitive answer and $0 for a catch-all answer; and in each of our two runs one of the four first-provider misses was billed $0.004834, so the 40-found case allows for up to 15 billed misses out of 60. Multiply those by your counts and you get the ranges in the table. The 14 September run of the same 10 finds cost $0.054, 22% less, because a cheaper second provider was serving that day. Your run will land somewhere in that spread.

Free allowances, and how far each gets you

• Hunter Free: 50 credits a month with API access. A find is 1 credit and a verify is 0.5, so 33 leads found and verified per month.
• Icypeas: 50 credits on signup, once. 45 leads found and verified.
• Prospeo Free: 100 credits a month, so 100 finds if every lead hits. Verification is not priced on the pages we read, and whether the Free plan includes the API is described inconsistently on Prospeo’s own pages.
• Findymail: 10 credits on signup.
• Treg: a promotional credit on signup; the amount varies and is not a published term.

Spreading a one-off 100 across free tiers is possible and this page does not pretend otherwise. It costs you the time to run three accounts and a merge, and the API terms on free plans are the ones vendors change first.

The two calls

Both calls go through Treg’s routed endpoints; the response names the provider that actually served, so a receipt is a receipt for that provider. The runner script that produced the receipts below is on the evidence page.

# 1. find: name + company domain in, work email out
treg call treg.people.email.find --method POST \
  --header "X-Treg-Route-Max-Cost: 0.25" \
  --data '{"full_name":"Patrick Collison","domain":"stripe.com"}'
# read output.email from the response, then

# 2. verify the address the finder returned, not the one you guessed
treg call treg.people.email.verify --method POST \
  --data '{"email":"<output.email from step 1>"}'
# output.valid is true only for a definitive "ok"; output.status is ok, catch_all, invalid or unknown

Three things the response tells you that the price list does not:

• Which provider served, and what each attempt cost. _treg.tried lists every provider tried with its outcome and charge. Four of our ten finds missed on the first provider and were served by the second; three of those misses were free and one was billed.
• Whether the finder changed the domain. One of the ten came back on a different domain from the one we sent (notion.so in, makenotion.com out). That is the finder correcting to the company’s mail domain. Verify what was returned, not what you sent.
• Whether the address was found or confirmed. A finder hit is not a deliverable address. The finder response says so in its advice field, and the verify step is where you learn the difference.

What ten real leads cost

Ten public-company executives, name plus company domain, sent to the routed finder, then each returned address sent to the routed verifier. Addresses are masked to their first letter before storage, including inside provider URLs.

Same ten inputs as the 14 September run: the same four people missed on the first provider both days, but the second provider that caught them was different, at $0.0089 rather than $0.005 per hit, which is the whole difference between the two totals. Latency is the other thing to notice: median about a second, but the two slowest calls took 20 and 24 seconds, both on the second provider. Set a timeout.

Ten answers for $0.0036, all from one verifier. The billing is the interesting part: the two addresses that came back ok were charged $0.00178 each, and the eight that came back catch_all were charged nothing. That is this provider’s rule on this day, not a property of verification in general; Hunter charges 0.5 credit and Icypeas 0.1 credit per address tested whatever the answer, and Findymail’s verifier draws a credit per attempt.

Eight catch-all results out of ten is not a fault in the verifier. Large companies commonly accept mail to any address at their domain, so no verifier can confirm the mailbox exists. You will see the same on your list for any lead at a bigger company, and you need a rule for it: send anyway and accept some bounces, or drop them, or route catch-all leads to a channel other than email.

Who each route fits

• A one-off list, and you may not do another for months: pay per call. The whole batch is under a dollar at any hit rate and there is nothing to cancel.
• You will do a few hundred a month, unevenly: pay per call is cheaper per lead at our observed rates (about $0.007 to $0.009 found and verified, against $0.021 in Icypeas credits), but Icypeas’ $19 of credits never expire and cover about 900 leads found and verified, so it is a small, bounded outlay if you would rather hold one vendor account.
• You already run a few thousand a month: Hunter or Findymail. The allowance gets used, the API is on the entry plan, and the verifier is the same vendor. Findymail’s bundled verifier credits make its verify step free while the pool lasts.
• You want Prospeo’s data specifically: the finding cost is competitive; ask them for the verification price before you build on it, because it is not published where we could read it.
• You want the vendor to fall through to a second finder for you: Treg does this on the same call and bills only the provider that hit. The Clay alternatives guide compares the other waterfall products.

What this page cannot tell you

• Your hit rate. Ten out of ten on famous names says nothing about your list. Plan on a third to two fifths from any single finder, and check the observed hit rates by provider before you choose one.
• Whether a catch-all address will bounce. No verifier can tell you. The share of catch-all domains on your list is a property of your list.
• Data quality between the vendors. We ran one route. The subscription figures are arithmetic on published terms, not measured costs. A measured column for Hunter, Findymail and Icypeas is planned once the same fixture has been run through each of their free tiers.
• Whether the terms have moved. Every figure carries the date it was read. Prospeo’s rollover rule and Free-plan API access are stated two ways on its own pages, and Treg’s verify cost depends on which provider is serving that day.

Next step

• Run the ten-lead fixture on your own account before you commit to anything; the runner script costs cents and shows you which provider serves your input shape.
• Treg’s find-and-verify workflow page has the same two calls with the route headers, people search lists the finder and verifier providers behind them, and pricing and docs carry the current per-call rates.
• For a single vendor, start from the docs linked in the table; each free allowance above is enough to test ten leads.

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.