How to Shortlist Enrichment Platforms for a Governance Review (8 Compared)

TL;DR

• Governance is a short list of testable things: who holds a key, how fast it can run, what each call costs, and whether you can reproduce a pull. Write them down before you read a vendor page.
• It takes about 45 minutes and spends about 10 LeadOcean records on a test pull. Sizing the audience, checking the account and reading usage are free.
• Eight platforms are compared below on facts each one publishes. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so.

Prerequisites

• A LeadOcean account from app.leadocean.io. The free plan has no card and 1,000 records, one-off.
• An API key exported as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY, plus curl and jq.
• Your security team's questionnaire, or the five checks from Step 1.

export LEADOCEAN_API_KEY="paste-your-key-here"

Step 1: Write the governance checklist as data

Five checks cover most reviews. Put them in a file so every vendor gets the same questions and the answers are comparable.

{
  "checks": [
    {"id": "keys",      "ask": "How many API keys per plan, and can one be revoked alone?"},
    {"id": "pace",      "ask": "Rate limit per key or per account, and what happens above it?"},
    {"id": "metering",  "ask": "What does one call cost, including a call that finds nothing?"},
    {"id": "identity",  "ask": "SSO and role-based access: which plan, and is it published?"},
    {"id": "repeat",    "ask": "Can a second reviewer rerun the same pull and get the same scope?"}
  ]
}

Answer each check from a public page or a call you ran yourself, with a date. A claim on a public page can be cited in the review. A claim on a sales call cannot.

Step 2: Size the audience for free

Reviewers approve a defined audience, not "enterprise contacts". Count it first. In an MCP client, leadocean_count_leads does the same job. Over REST, send count=true as a query parameter with limit at 1.

curl -s "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": ["Revenue Operations"],
    "jobLevel": ["Director", "VP"],
    "country": ["US"],
    "employeeRange": ["1001-5000", "5001-10000", "10001+"],
    "limit": 1
  }' | jq '.meta'

A count costs 0 records. Attach the filter file to the review. It is the scope of the data you are asking to process.

Step 3: Check the account, usage and pace

Two free endpoints answer the keys and pace checks from your own account. GET /v1/account shows the plan. GET /v1/usage shows what you have spent.

curl -s https://api.leadocean.io/v1/account -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" | jq .
curl -s https://api.leadocean.io/v1/usage   -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" | jq .

Rate limits are per account: 5 requests a second on Free, 50 on Solo, 200 on Agency and 10,000 on Platform. Above it you get a 429 with Retry-After. Keys per plan: 1 on Free and Solo, 5 on Agency, 20 on Platform. See pricing.

Step 4: Run the same 10-row pull on every vendor

The test pull proves metering and repeatability. Log each run so a second reviewer can reproduce it.

BODY='{"title":["Revenue Operations"],"jobLevel":["Director","VP"],"country":["US"],"employeeRange":["1001-5000"],"limit":10}'
curl -s https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d "$BODY" > pull.json
printf '%s,%s,%s\n' "$(date -u +%FT%TZ)" "$(echo "$BODY" | shasum | cut -c1-12)" "$(jq '.data | length' pull.json)" >> audit.csv

This spends up to 10 records, one per person returned. Re-run GET /v1/usage and check the delta equals the rows you received. If a vendor's meter disagrees with its docs, that is a finding.

Step 5: Compare eight platforms on published facts

Every vendor fact below comes from its own page, checked in September 2026. A dash means we found nothing published, not that the feature is missing.

Our view: if SSO and role-based access are hard requirements, Clay and Lusha publish them on their top plans and LeadOcean does not. If you need published limits you can test today and a meter you can reconcile, run Steps 3 and 4 on all eight.

What you get

The Step 2 count is a real result. We ran the same filters through the free leadocean_count_leads tool on 2026-10-21 (trimmed).

{
  "total": 1080,
  "totalIsExact": true,
  "totalAll": 1612,
  "distinctCompanies": 683,
  "credits": 0,
  "defaults": "Counted only addresses worth sending to (emailStatus: verified or catch_all_valid or catch_all)"
}

That is 1,080 mailable people across 683 employers. Without the email condition the same filters match 1,612 people. Your number will move as the data changes.

The pull in Step 4 returns thin person records with no contact points. This is the response shape from the API reference, trimmed, with placeholder values.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": [
    {
      "profile_data": {"profile_full_name": "Jane Doe"},
      "contact_data": {
        "contact_current_experiences": [{"job_title": "Director, Revenue Operations", "company_name": "Acme", "company_domain": "acme.com"}],
        "has_email": true,
        "email_status": "verified"
      },
      "meta": {"source_ids": {"person_id": "123456", "person_group_id": "123456"}}
    }
  ],
  "meta": {"count": 10, "limit": 10, "nextCursor": "<opaque cursor>"}
}

Log meta.source_ids.person_id for each row. It is the key a second reviewer sends back to POST /v1/people/enrich.

Troubleshooting

FAQ