Crustdata vs Explorium (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Crustdata and Explorium both sell B2B people and company data to developers and AI agents, and both bill in credits. The difference is that Explorium prints its prices and Crustdata does not.

At list price you can cost a million Explorium lookups today. You cannot cost a million Crustdata lookups without a quote.

Verdict

• Pick Crustdata if you want a larger claimed people index, live web and job data, or change alerts on people and companies. It publishes credit costs per call, and you take the dollar price from sales or your dashboard.
• Pick Explorium if you want a price list you can read, company breadth, events and a cheap start. Lite is $29.99 for 500 credits, and the rate limit is 200 queries a minute against Crustdata's 15 to 30.
• Pick neither if you want one flat monthly price for volume through REST and MCP. LeadOcean is one option: Pro is $499 a month, flat, with no credits.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Crustdata claims the bigger people index, and Explorium claims the bigger company count. Crustdata's homepage says 1B people. Explorium says 767M+ professional profiles and 146M+ business entities, and its hero line rounds that to 800M+ people and 150M+ companies.

Company counts are where Crustdata's own pages disagree. The homepage states both 60M companies and 200M+ companies (Crustdata, September 2026). This page quotes no single company figure for Crustdata.

All of these are marketing counts. A profile is not a mailable contact. Neither vendor publishes how many people carry an email or a phone number, so contact coverage cannot be compared on paper.

Email labels differ. Crustdata returns deliverable, catch_all, invalid or unknown beside each business email (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026). Explorium returns valid, invalid or catch-all (Explorium docs, October 2026).

Scope differs more than size. Crustdata adds job search, social posts, live web fetch and watchers that alert you when a person or company changes. Explorium adds business enrichments for technology and financials, plus event tracking such as funding rounds, hiring and M&A.

Run the same 500 people through each before you commit. Compare match rate and email status, not the homepage counts.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with a hosted MCP server. They differ in how much you send and how many calls a lookup takes.

Crustdata takes a profile URL and returns a profile in one call. Here is the first request from its docs, with a placeholder person. It costs 1 credit for the base profile, and a request takes up to 25 URLs (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.crustdata.com/person/enrich \
  --header "authorization: Bearer $CRUSTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "content-type: application/json" \
  --header "x-api-version: 2025-11-01" \
  --data '{"professional_network_profile_urls": ["https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe/"]}'

Emails and phones sit behind extra fields and credits. The dedicated /person/contact/enrich route needs an enterprise plan, and self-serve keys get a 403 (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026).

Explorium needs two calls. You match a person to a prospect_id first, then call the contact endpoint with that ID. This is the email-only body from its docs, priced at 2 credits (Explorium docs, October 2026).

curl -X POST "https://api.explorium.ai/v2/prospects/contact_information/enrich" \
  -H "API_KEY: $EXPLORIUM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"prospect_id": "PROSPECT_ID_FROM_MATCH", "parameters": {"contact_types": ["email"]}}'

Rate limits shape what scales. Crustdata defaults to 15 requests a minute on person enrich, so 1M single lookups would take about 46 days (1,000,000 / 15 a minute = 66,667 minutes). That figure is derived, not published. Crustdata's answer is batch jobs, and a higher limit means an email to its team (Crustdata rate limits, September 2026).

Explorium allows 200 queries a minute in a 60-second sliding window. A request with 50 IDs uses 50 queries. Going over returns a 429 with a Retry-After header (Explorium docs, October 2026). At that pace 1M rows take 5,000 minutes, about 3.5 days.

On MCP, both return data. Crustdata supports OAuth for interactive clients and an API key for code. Explorium's server has 11 tools, and its statistics tools are free, so an agent can size an audience before it spends credits (Explorium MCP docs, October 2026).

For bulk, both stop at 10,000 records per async job. A 1M list is at least 100 jobs on either one.

Pricing

Both bill in credits. Explorium turns credits into dollars on a public page, and Crustdata does not.

Crustdata lists credit costs: search is 0.03 credits per result, and person enrich is 1 to 7 credits depending on the fields. A work email through /person/enrich is 2 credits (1 base plus 1 business email). The docs say the dollar value depends on your plan and tell you to confirm it in your dashboard (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). The pricing page lists no plan names and no dollar prices (Crustdata pricing, September 2026).

Purchased credits expire. The docs say 12 months after purchase (Crustdata credits, September 2026). A Crustdata blog post from 30 July 2026 says 6 months (Crustdata blog, September 2026), so confirm the term in your dashboard before you buy in bulk.

Explorium sells five packs: Lite $29.99 for 500 credits, Starter $149.99 for 5K, Growth $749.99 for 30K, Scale $7,499.99 for 500K, and a custom Enterprise tier. Credits last 12 months and packs are non-refundable (Explorium pricing, October 2026).

At 10,000 records a month

Take 10,000 work-email lookups.

• Crustdata: 10,000 x 2 credits = 20,000 credits on /person/enrich, or 10,000 credits on the enterprise-only contact route. No public dollar price, so no total.
• Explorium: 10,000 x 2 credits = 20,000 credits. Four Starter packs give 20,000, so 4 x $149.99 = $599.96. Add phones at 5 credits and you need 50,000 credits: one Growth pack plus four Starter packs is $749.99 + $599.96 = $1,349.95.

Explorium does not publish what the match step costs, so its figures are a floor.

At 1M records a month

Take 1,000,000 work-email lookups.

• Crustdata: 1,000,000 x 2 = 2,000,000 credits self-serve, or 1,000,000 credits on the contact route, enterprise only. No public price at 1M. Dollars equal credits times your quoted price per credit, which is not published.
• Explorium: 1,000,000 x 2 = 2,000,000 credits. The cheapest rate is Scale at $0.015 a credit, so 4 packs x $7,499.99 = $29,999.96. With phones, 5,000,000 credits is 10 packs and $74,999.90.

Enterprise is a custom quote with volume discounts, so a negotiated Explorium price could be lower. Packs are one-off purchases, so one 1M pull is not a monthly bill.

Where Crustdata wins

• A larger claimed people index. 1B people against Explorium's 767M+ profiles, by each vendor's own count.
• Live and changing data. Job search, social posts, live web fetch and watchers that flag a changed person or company.
• Pay per request. Search is 0.03 credits per result, and a contact lookup with no match is not billed. Light, selective use can cost little once you have your credit price.
• Per-account price lookup. GET /account/endpoints returns the credit cost for your own account.

Where Explorium wins

• A price list. You can cost a job before you talk to anyone. Lite starts at $29.99.
• Company breadth. 146M+ business entities against a Crustdata homepage that gives two company counts.
• Events and enrichments. Funding, hiring and M&A events plus business enrichments for technology and financials.
• No gate on contact data. Its contact endpoint is documented without a plan restriction. Crustdata's equivalent needs enterprise.
• Faster defaults. 200 queries a minute against 15 to 30.

If you need volume through an API

We build LeadOcean, so weigh this section accordingly. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies, and you reach them over REST and a 12-tool MCP server that returns records, with OAuth sign-in. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat, with unlimited searches and lookups, no credits and 100 requests per second per key (LeadOcean pricing, September 2026).

For bulk work, POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, and the app has an Exports page with a CSV download (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). LeadOcean is smaller than Explorium on companies and than Crustdata on people, and it has no event stream or watchers. See the Crustdata alternative page and Crustdata alternatives for line-by-line versions.

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