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

Hunter.io and Dropcontact both find business emails and bill a credit per email found. They start from different inputs. Hunter starts from a domain and indexes emails it has seen on the web. Dropcontact starts from a name and a company, builds the address and verifies it. Hunter figures were checked in September 2026 and Dropcontact figures in October 2026. Hunter prices are in dollars and Dropcontact prices are in euros. We do not convert between them.

Verdict

• Pick Hunter.io if you know the company domain, want a free plan that renews every month, or need sequences, a browser extension and an MCP server in one account. It is also the one with a published price at 1M lookups.
• Pick Dropcontact if you hold a list of names and companies, sell into Europe, or want HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce enrichment. It charges only for a verified email and refunds a miss.
• Pick neither if you need to search a database by title, country or industry, or you want phone numbers and volume at one flat price. Neither tool offers that. LeadOcean is one option.

Side by side

Data and coverage

Hunter owns an index and Dropcontact does not. Hunter's homepage cites 150,430,313 verified email addresses (Hunter, September 2026). Dropcontact says it works only with algorithms and uses no contact databases (Dropcontact pricing, October 2026). So there is nothing to count or filter at Dropcontact. You bring the contact.

That changes the failure mode. Hunter can miss because the address was never seen on the web. Dropcontact can miss because the name and company do not resolve to a domain. In both cases a miss costs nothing: Hunter charges no credit when nothing is found, and Dropcontact refunds the credit (Hunter help center, September 2026; Dropcontact API docs, October 2026).

Neither publishes a hit rate you can plan on. Dropcontact reports a 54.9% effective enrichment rate on 20,000 contacts, after removing hard bounces and wrong domains (Dropcontact benchmark, October 2026). Dropcontact funded and ran that study, and Hunter is one of the 15 tools in it. Treat it as a claim to test on your own list.

Phones are thin on both sides. Hunter returns a phone_number field on some results (Hunter API docs, September 2026). Dropcontact returns phone and mobile_phone, and says its mobile numbers come from signature extraction in email flows (Dropcontact pricing, October 2026). Neither gives a coverage count. Test 200 contacts before you count on a phone.

API and developer experience

Hunter is a plain GET. You pass a domain and a name, and the answer comes back in the same call. Every Email Finder result carries a verification status of valid, accept_all or unknown (Hunter API docs, 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"

Dropcontact is a two-step batch. You POST up to 250 contacts and get a request ID. You then GET the result with that ID until it is ready, or pass a custom_callback_url to receive a webhook instead (Dropcontact API docs, October 2026).

curl -X POST "https://api.dropcontact.com/v1/people/enrich/all" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-Access-Token: $DROPCONTACT_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"data":[{"first_name":"Jane","last_name":"Doe","website":"acme.com"}],"language":"en"}'

The GET returns "Request not ready yet, try again in 30 seconds" until processing ends. Each email comes back with a qualification such as nominative@pro or catch_all. That suits a nightly job. It is an extra moving part if you want one answer per call.

Watch the error codes. Hunter returns 403 when you hit the rate limit and 429 when you hit your credit quota. Dropcontact does the reverse: 429 for too many requests and 403 for an exceeded quota (Hunter API docs, September 2026; Dropcontact API docs, October 2026). A retry loop written for one will misread the other.

Rate limits bite differently at volume. Hunter's Email Finder allows 500 requests a minute, so 1,000,000 single lookups take 2,000 minutes, about 33 hours. Dropcontact allows 60 a second, and 1,000,000 contacts at 250 per request is 4,000 POST calls.

Pricing

Both tools charge per email found, so cost scales with volume. A credit and a record are the same unit in this comparison: one email found.

At 10,000 emails a month. Hunter's Growth plan includes 10,000 credits. It costs $149 a month, or $104 a month billed yearly. $149 / 10,000 = $0.0149 per email, or $0.0104 billed yearly (Hunter pricing, September 2026). Hunter's own Data Platform sells 10,000 Search credits for $209, one-off (Hunter Data Platform, September 2026).

Dropcontact's nearest published tier is 11,000 credits: €199 a month on Starter, or €166 a month billed yearly. €199 / 10,000 = €0.0199 per email at best (Dropcontact pricing, October 2026). A miss is refunded, so a lower hit rate lowers the credits you use. At this size Hunter is cheaper on list price, but the currencies differ.

At 1M emails a month. Hunter publishes a price. 1,000,000 Search credits on Data Platform cost $6,900, paid once and valid 12 months. $6,900 / 1,000,000 = $0.0069 per email (Hunter Data Platform, September 2026). The all-in-one route costs more: Scale at $299 plus 975,000 pack credits at up to $0.02 each is about $19,799. Packs also cap at 180,000 credits per purchase (Hunter help center, September 2026).

Dropcontact has no public 1M price. Its top published tier is 150,000 credits a month, and Enterprise starts at 200,000 credits on a custom quote (Dropcontact pricing, October 2026). We do not multiply a rate out to 1M. Ask Dropcontact for a quote at your volume.

Credits also expire differently. Hunter's monthly credits reset each month and do not carry over, while yearly and Data Platform credits last 12 months (Hunter help center, September 2026). Dropcontact lists credit carry-over under Growth, and not under Starter (Dropcontact pricing, October 2026).

Where Hunter.io wins

• Published price at 1M. $6,900 on Data Platform, against a custom quote at Dropcontact.
• Cheaper at 10,000. $149 a month on Growth, against €199 for 11,000 credits.
• A free plan that renews. 50 credits every month, where Dropcontact lists 50 free credits to try.
• More in the box. Sequences, a browser extension, signals and an MCP server on every plan (Hunter, September 2026).
• Direct answers. One GET, one result, no polling loop.

Where Dropcontact wins

• Starting from names. It finds and verifies a business email from a first name, a last name and a company, with no domain needed. Hunter's finder needs a domain, a company or a LinkedIn handle.
• Pay on success. A credit is charged only for a verified email, and a miss is refunded (Dropcontact API docs, October 2026).
• European and CRM fit. Native HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce enrichment on a separate CRM plan, and a stated CNIL audit (Dropcontact pricing, October 2026).
• Higher rate limit. 60 requests per second, against 15 on Hunter's finder.
• Catch-all checks. Advanced catch-all verification is listed on every plan (Dropcontact pricing, October 2026).

If you need volume through an API

Hunter and Dropcontact both start from a contact or a domain you already hold. If you need to search by title, seniority, country or industry first, LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies behind 50 people filters. 366M people have an email and 166M have a phone number, and counts are free. Free gives you 1,000 records one-off, no card. Pro is $499 a month flat, with no credits and no per-record price, over REST and a 12-tool MCP server, with POST /v1/exports taking 50,000 rows per request. LeadOcean does not take a name plus a domain: you search by domain, then enrich by person_id. At 10,000 emails a month both tools here are cheaper than $499 on list price.

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