Crustdata vs Hunter.io (2026): Data, Pricing and API Compared

Hunter.io is an email finder with outreach attached. Crustdata is a data API over its own web-built index of people and companies. Hunter is the one you can price today, from $49 a month or $6,900 for 1M lookups. Crustdata is the one to test if you want search by filter, job and post data, or change alerts. Neither publishes a price you can compare line by line, so this page shows the arithmetic for both.

Verdict

• Pick Hunter.io if you find work emails from a name and a domain, want a recurring free plan, or want finding, verifying and sending in one product. Its Growth plan costs $149 a month for 10,000 credits, and it prints a price at every volume up to 1,000,000 credits.
• Pick Crustdata if you build in code or with agents and want to search a 1B-person index by filter, then enrich only the people you keep. It also covers jobs, social posts and change watchers, which Hunter does not.
• Pick neither if you need a list built by title, seniority and country, with phones, at a price you can forecast. Hunter starts from a domain you already know, and Crustdata publishes credits, not dollars. LeadOcean searches 693M people for a flat $499 a month.

Side by side

All prices are USD list prices, checked in September 2026. Monthly price first, billed-yearly figure after it.

Data and coverage

Crustdata is a search index, and Hunter is an email index with a verifier on top. They answer different questions. Crustdata asks "which people match these filters". Hunter asks "what is the email for this person at this domain".

Crustdata claims 1B people on its homepage. The same page states 60M companies in its search copy and 200M+ in a graph stat, so this page quotes no single company count (Crustdata, September 2026). The index also holds jobs, social posts and company signals, not just contacts.

Hunter's homepage cites 150,430,313 verified email addresses (Hunter, September 2026). That is an email count, not a people count. Hunter's Discover endpoint lists companies by industry, headcount and location, and the call is free. Technology, funding and founding year filters are Premium (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

Neither vendor publishes how many of its people have an email or a phone. Crustdata prices a business email at +1 credit and a phone at +2 on person enrich (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). Its dedicated contact endpoint returns four email statuses: deliverable, catch_all, invalid and unknown. It needs an enterprise plan, and self-serve keys get a 403 (Crustdata contact docs, September 2026).

Hunter returns a verification status on each email it finds. Its responses carry a phone_number field with no published count. If phones are the job, test a sample of your own list on both before you buy.

Credit expiry is unsettled. Crustdata's docs say purchased credits expire 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.

API and developer experience

Both are REST APIs with a hosted MCP server, and both are small to start with. Crustdata takes a profile URL and returns a profile. Hunter takes a name and a domain and returns an email.

Crustdata, enrich a person by profile URL, from its docs:

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/"]}'

That returns the base profile for 1 credit. The pricing docs add 1 credit for a business email and 2 for a phone on the same endpoint (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). Each request takes up to 25 profile URLs. At a zero balance every request returns a 402 (Crustdata credits, September 2026).

Hunter, Email Finder, from its API docs:

curl "https://api.hunter.io/v2/email-finder?domain=acme.com&first_name=Jane&last_name=Doe" \
  -H "X-API-KEY: $HUNTER_API_KEY"

It returns data.email, a score and a verification.status. A found email costs 1 credit and a miss costs nothing (Hunter help center, September 2026). Repeat lookups in the same billing period are not charged again.

Rate limits are the practical gap. Crustdata defaults to 15 requests a minute on person enrich and 30 on search (Crustdata rate limits, September 2026). Hunter allows 15 a second and 500 a minute on Email Finder, and documents limits per endpoint, not per plan. A rate-limited Hunter call gets a 403, and a spent quota gets a 429 (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

At those limits, 1M lookups sent one per request take about 33 hours on Hunter (1,000,000 / 500 a minute = 2,000 minutes). On Crustdata they take about 46 days (1,000,000 / 15 a minute). Crustdata's answer is batch jobs of up to 10,000 identifiers, which run asynchronously. Hunter's is Bulk Email Finder, up to 50,000 rows per file.

On MCP, Hunter's server uses an API key in a header and is included in every plan (Hunter MCP, September 2026). Crustdata's accepts OAuth sign-in for interactive clients and an API key as a bearer token for code (Crustdata MCP docs, September 2026).

Pricing

Hunter prints its prices and Crustdata prints only credits. Both bill per record, so the worked examples assume every lookup finds a work email. A lower find rate lowers the Hunter bill. Crustdata's contact endpoint does not bill misses either.

10,000 work emails a month

• Hunter Growth: $149 a month for 10,000 credits, or $104 a month billed yearly ($1,248 a year, 120,000 credits) (Hunter pricing, September 2026). Cost per email: $149 / 10,000 = $0.0149.
• Crustdata: 10,000 x 2 credits (1 base + 1 business email) = 20,000 credits on /person/enrich, or 10,000 credits on the enterprise-only contact endpoint (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026). No public price per credit, so no dollar total.

At this size only Hunter can be priced from public pages. A Crustdata blog post reports a lowest tier from $95 a month. The pricing page does not list it (Crustdata blog, September 2026).

1M work emails

• Hunter Data Platform: 1,000,000 Search credits at $0.0069 each is $6,900, paid once and valid 12 months (Hunter Data Platform, September 2026).
• Crustdata: 1,000,000 x (1 + 1) = 2,000,000 credits on /person/enrich, or 1,000,000 x 1 = 1,000,000 credits on the enterprise-only contact endpoint. No public 1M price. Dollars equal credits times your quoted price per credit, which is not public.

We do not multiply a rate out to 1M for Crustdata, because no rate is published. Ask for a quote with your volume and endpoint, and ask whether credits expire at 6 or 12 months.

The subscription route costs Hunter buyers more at that size. Scale is $299 a month for 25,000 credits. The other 975,000 would come from packs at up to $0.02 a credit, about $19,799 in all, and a pack purchase caps at 180,000 credits (Hunter help center, September 2026). Hunter's $6,900 is a one-off purchase, not a monthly bill. Separate Verification credits start at $11 per 1,000.

Where Crustdata wins

• A bigger people index. It claims 1B people. Hunter cites 150,430,313 email addresses and no people count.
• Search before you spend. Search is 0.03 credits per result, and company identify and autocomplete are free. You narrow the list first, then enrich the people you keep.
• Signals Hunter does not have. Job search, social posts, live web fetch and entity watchers at 5 credits per changed person on the 30-day schedule (Crustdata pricing docs, September 2026).
• Pay per request for small, selective work. A lookup with no match costs nothing on the contact endpoint. Light use can cost little once you have a quote.

Where Hunter.io wins

• A price you can read. Every plan, credit pack and Data Platform tier is printed. Crustdata's pricing page lists no plan names or dollar prices.
• Higher default rate limits. 500 requests a minute on Email Finder, against 15 on Crustdata person enrich.
• Find, verify and send in one place. Hunter adds Sequences, a Chrome extension, a Google Sheets add-on and signals (Hunter, September 2026).
• A recurring free plan. Free renews 50 credits every month with no sales call.
• Contact data without an enterprise gate. Email Finder works on every plan. Crustdata gates its contact endpoint behind enterprise.

If you need volume through an API

LeadOcean fits when the job is building a list, not filling one in. It holds 693M people, 366M with an email and 166M with a phone number, plus 63M companies, behind REST and a 12-tool MCP server. Pro is $499 a month flat with no credits, and Free gives 1,000 records one-off with no card. POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request, and the rate limit is 100 requests per second per key.

LeadOcean does not credit back bounces, so read email_status before you send. It has no sequencer, extension or change watchers. See the Crustdata alternative page for a line-by-line comparison, the Crustdata alternatives list, or LeadOcean pricing. Related matchups: Hunter vs Wiza, Hunter vs Kaspr and Hunter vs Icypeas.

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