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

Findymail and Hunter.io both find a work email from a name and a company, verify it, and charge only when they find one. Hunter is the one you can price: every plan and a 1M-credit figure are public. Findymail does more around the email, with US phones, plain-language lead search and signals.

Every fact below was checked in September 2026 and carries its source link. Where a vendor showed nothing we could read, the page says so.

Verdict

• Pick Findymail if you want US phone numbers, a lead list built from a sentence, or job-change signals next to the email finder, and you accept that its plan prices sit behind a bot check.
• Pick Hunter.io if you want a recurring free plan, a price you can read before you sign up, and one product that finds, verifies and sends. Growth is $149 a month for 10,000 credits, and 1M credits cost $6,900 on its Data Platform.
• Pick neither if you start from an audience, not a name list. You need filters, phones outside the US, or a fixed bill at 1M records. See the LeadOcean section below.

Side by side

Prices are USD list prices. Monthly price first, billed-yearly figure after it.

Data and coverage

Neither tool sells a database you browse by title or industry. Both take a person and find an address, so coverage is a find rate on your list. Neither publishes a find rate we could verify.

Hunter is an email index with a verifier on top. Its homepage cites 150,430,313 verified email addresses (Hunter, September 2026). Email Finder returns the most likely address and a status of valid, accept_all or unknown. Public addresses come back with the source pages and dates (Hunter API docs, September 2026).

Findymail publishes no database size. Its docs say a finder credit is used only if a verified email is found (Findymail API docs, September 2026). It reaches further than Hunter in four places:

• Phones: 10 credits per number, found from a profile URL. EU citizens return nothing.
• Lead search: Intellimatch takes a query such as "SaaS companies in US" and exports up to 5,000 companies per search.
• Employees: one call returns people at a company by job title, 1 credit per contact, as LinkedIn profiles.
• Signals: the docs list a signals endpoint with keyword mentions among its types.

Hunter reaches further in one place. Discover lists companies by industry, headcount and location, and the call is free. Hunter's own docs show phone_number as null in examples, so treat phones as a bonus, not a feature.

Both have a standalone verifier. Findymail's POST /api/verify costs one verifier credit per check. Hunter's Email Verifier costs 0.5 credit.

API and developer experience

Both are small REST APIs that take a name and a domain. Findymail uses a POST with a Bearer token. Hunter uses a GET with the key in the query string, a header or a Bearer token.

Findymail, from its API docs, checked September 2026:

curl --request POST "https://app.findymail.com/api/search/name" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $FINDYMAIL_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{"name": "Jane Doe", "domain": "acme.com"}'

It returns a contact object with the email, or nothing if no verified email exists. Add webhook_url and the search runs in the background and posts the result to you.

Hunter Email Finder, from its API docs, checked September 2026:

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).

The rate limits are measured in different units, so do not compare the numbers directly. Findymail allows 300 simultaneous requests on most endpoints. Two real-time search endpoints are lower: 5 and 30 concurrent. Hunter allows 15 requests a second and 500 a minute on Email Finder, and limits are set per endpoint, not per plan.

Hunter returns 403 when you hit the rate limit and 429 when you hit your usage limit (Hunter API docs, September 2026). Write your retry logic for both.

Both have a remote MCP server. Findymail's has 14 tools and signs in through the browser in Cursor, with a bearer token as the fallback (Findymail Cursor plugin, September 2026). Hunter's takes an API key in a header and is included in all plans (Hunter MCP, September 2026).

Pricing

Hunter is the only one of the two you can price end to end. Both bill one credit per email found and nothing for a miss, so the examples assume every lookup finds an email. A lower find rate lowers both bills.

At 10,000 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.
• Findymail: 10,000 finder credits. We could not read plan prices, so find the step that covers 10,000 on Findymail's pricing page.

At 1M emails a month

• 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).
• Findymail: 1,000,000 finder credits. No public 1M price. Ask for a quote.

The $6,900 is a one-off purchase, not a monthly bill. The subscription route costs more. Hunter Scale is $299 a month for 25,000 credits, and the other 975,000 would come from packs at up to $0.02 a credit. That is about $19,799, and a pack purchase caps at 180,000 credits (Hunter help center, September 2026).

Phones change the sums on Findymail. A phone costs 10 credits, ten times an email, so a phone-heavy pull needs ten times the credits. We do not turn that into a dollar figure, because no rate is public.

Hunter credits on monthly plans reset each month and do not roll over. Yearly and Data Platform credits stay valid 12 months. Verification on Hunter's Data Platform is extra, from $11 per 1,000.

Where Findymail wins

• Phones. It returns US numbers from a profile URL. Hunter's phone field is null in its own examples and carries no published count.
• Lead search. Intellimatch builds a company and contact list from a sentence. Hunter's Discover is free but filters by industry, headcount and location.
• Signals and CRM work. Its site lists intent signals, a Chrome extension and CRM enrichment alongside the API (Findymail, September 2026).
• Reach in an agent. 14 MCP tools, with browser sign-in and no key to paste.

Where Hunter.io wins

• Published prices. Every plan, every credit pack and the 1M figure are on its pages. You can budget before you sign up.
• A free plan that renews. 50 credits a month. Findymail's free terms were not readable.
• Stated rate limits per second. 15 a second on Email Finder, with clear 403 and 429 meanings.
• Source pages on each email. Hunter returns where a public address was seen, with dates. That helps when you must explain why an address is in your file.
• Bulk files up to 50,000 rows, with the unpaid-row cap published by plan.

If you need volume through an API

Neither tool is built to pull a million records from a filterable database. LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies behind REST and a 12-tool MCP server, with 100 requests per second per key on every plan. Pro is $499 a month flat with no credits and no per-record price, and Free gives 1,000 records one-off with no card. POST /v1/exports returns up to 50,000 rows per request (LeadOcean exports docs, September 2026). It is not a drop-in swap for name-and-domain lookups, since you search by domain first and then enrich by person_id. See LeadOcean pricing.

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