7 Proxycurl Alternatives for People and Company Data APIs

Key takeaways:

• Proxycurl shut down on July 4, 2025, to comply with a settlement of LinkedIn's lawsuit, and the court entered a consent judgment three weeks later. Its team now runs NinjaPear, which kept Proxycurl's old plan ladder, starting at $49 a month for 2,500 credits.
• Most products used Proxycurl for a few jobs: a person record, a company record, a work email, or the person behind an email address. List the jobs you used before you compare vendors, because no alternative here copies Proxycurl's endpoints one for one.
• Check what an empty result costs before you compare prices. People Data Labs, Coresignal and Apollo.io bill only on a match, NinjaPear bills a person profile call either way, and on our side an empty lookup, enrichment, standard search, or email or phone lookup is free.
• We're one of the seven. Reverse Contact covers people, companies, emails and phones by API, and showing our data inside a product you sell takes a Platform contract, priced on a call with sales.

Proxycurl was a data API (a service your code calls to fetch records) that returned person and company profiles, work emails and job listings. Products wired it into signup flows, CRMs and AI agents, and in July 2025 it switched off for good.

If your product still has a broken call where Proxycurl used to be, you need Proxycurl alternatives that cover the same jobs without becoming the next vendor to vanish. Some teams want a person and company data enrichment API, while others mainly need work emails or company records.

Below are seven replacements, written for the engineers and product owners who have to fix that call. We build Reverse Contact, which is why it sits at number one, and each entry says where a rival is the better pick. We read every price on the vendor's site or in its docs in October 2026.

What Happened to Proxycurl

Proxycurl was run by Nubela, a company based in Singapore, and it sold credits you spent on profile, email and job lookups. The way it ended is worth knowing, because it explains why the replacement question is about more than price.

The Lawsuit and the Shutdown

In January 2025, LinkedIn sued Nubela, Proxycurl, its founder and its chief technology officer in a federal court in California. The court complaint opens with the claim that "Defendants operate a business that is built on scraping LinkedIn member data," and lists six counts, from breach of contract and fraud to misappropriation. Those are allegations, and the case never went to trial.

Instead, the court entered a final judgment on consent on July 25, 2025. Three weeks earlier, Nubela's own blog announced "Today, we are shutting Proxycurl down," and said the company had to close the product to comply with its settlement. The old product page now says Proxycurl is no longer in service and points visitors to NinjaPear.

The Jobs You Need to Replace

Proxycurl sold many endpoints (each separate call an API offers). The table below lists the six jobs teams ask about most, with the credit price Proxycurl charged in its last published pricing (May 2025) and where each job lands among the alternatives below.

Read across the rows before you read the reviews. If your product only ever turned an email into a person, almost every vendor here offers a reverse email lookup, so compare them on match quality and on what an empty result costs.

Why Vendor Risk Belongs on Your Shortlist

Losing a data vendor overnight is the part of the Proxycurl story that hurts most. Nubela's announcement said "Today, we are shutting Proxycurl down," and every feature built on its API went down with it.

That worry shows up in the first thing people ask. In a thread on Reddit where an n8n user asked for a replacement, the poster replied to one suggestion with "I avoid relying on solutions who might be down any time honestly." That's one user's view, not a survey, but it's the right instinct.

A Data API Turns Into Infrastructure

Buyers we talk to say the same thing in their own words. Once a data API sits inside your product, it stops being a tool and starts acting like infrastructure, and the bar for trusting the vendor goes up with it.

An AI engineer at a recruiting-tech startup told us that before building a product on a vendor's data set, they "need to have confidence that you guys are going to be like around." Ask every vendor on your list how long it has sold this data and what its contract promises if the service ends, and judge the answers before you judge the price.

Plan for a Second Vendor From Day One

Teams that build on people data rarely trust one source alone. Many add a new vendor as a low-volume fallback first, then move it up the order once its results hold up, and some call two vendors on critical lookups and merge the answers so one gap or outage never blinds the product.

Even teams that would love a single vendor end up writing their own rules per field, because each provider's coverage and quirks differ. Build your replacement so a second vendor can slot in behind the first without a rewrite. Work emails are the cheapest place to start, since a backup finder such as one of the Hunter.io alternatives only runs on the lookups your first vendor missed.

The 7 Best Proxycurl Alternatives Compared

Our own API leads the list for the plain reason that it's ours. After it, the order runs from the closest swap (NinjaPear, built by the former Proxycurl team) through the large people-and-company vendors (People Data Labs, Coresignal, Crustdata) to two options built around something else: a sales app with an API (Apollo.io) and prepaid credits for AI agents (Explorium).

The third column maps each tool back to the Proxycurl jobs in the table above, which matters more than any headline coverage number.

Apollo.io covers all six jobs on paper, but on per-seat pricing, so the right pick still depends on which two or three Proxycurl jobs your product actually called and what each costs at your volume.

1. Reverse Contact

Best for: Products resolving people from emails.

Overview: Reverse Contact is a people and company data API. You pass in what you already know, such as an email address, a full name plus the employer's domain, a company name or some search filters, and the response is a profile laid out as JSON (labeled fields your code can read directly).

Profile lookups take one of two paths. Cached means we answer from a copy already on our side, which is quick.

Live means the profile is retrieved at the moment you ask, as a background job that often takes tens of seconds and sometimes several minutes, so the result is pushed to a webhook, a URL on your server we call when it's done. Before either, a free /check call tells you the date of the last full refresh, so you pay for live data only when the stored copy is too old.

We'd rather return nothing than a profile that fails our checks. If more than one person could fit what you sent, we can return the candidates so your code makes the call, rather than us quietly picking one.

collectif.work, a recruiting platform, uses us two ways. Recruiters search candidates by title, location, company and industry, with up to 100 matching profiles per search request. New candidates type in an email and a name at signup, we resolve who they are, and collectif.work's own AI drafts a profile they review and edit. Across both, that's 500,000 to 800,000 API requests a month.

Key features:

• Person enrichment from an email, or from a name plus a company domain, returning role, work history, skills and company context.
• Company enrichment from a domain or a company name, with size, industry, headquarters and description.
• People search by role, seniority, sector, headcount or geography, with a free count of how many profiles fit before you spend a credit.
• Work email finding for 3 credits when we return an address, and phone finding for 20 credits when a search turns up at least one number.
• The same response format across the REST API, webhooks, CSV uploads and our MCP server, which lets assistants like Claude or ChatGPT query us directly.
• Maintained apps for Clay, Zapier and Make, with n8n connecting through a standard HTTP step.

Pricing: You can start with credit packs from $100, with no subscription. Team plans, billed monthly with no annual commitment, are Go at $249, Plus at $449 and Max at $699: Go removes the meter on profile lookups by ID, Plus adds search, and Max adds enrichment from an email, a name or a domain, while live re-fetches, emails and phones cost credits on every plan. All three are for your own team. To put the data in front of your customers, you need a Platform contract, priced on a call with sales.

Pros: Published prices for Go, Plus, Max and credit packs, a free freshness check and match count, no charge when a lookup, enrichment, standard search, email or phone lookup finds nothing, candidate profiles returned when a match is ambiguous, the same response through every delivery route

Cons: No job listings, and coverage is strongest in the Americas and Europe

How to start using it:

1. Register for free trial credits; no card is needed.
2. Pull 200 records your product used to look up, keeping the email, or the name and company domain, you had for each.
3. Run them as cached lookups first, then live for the ones whose /check date looks old.
4. Count matches, empty results and wrong people separately.
5. If your customers will see the data, talk to us about Platform before launch.

Why it's a good Proxycurl alternative: It covers the email-to-person, company, work email and people-search jobs through one API, starting from an email or a name, adds phones, and lets you choose per request how fresh the answer needs to be.

Final verdict: Pick Reverse Contact if your product starts from emails or names and needs a person and company record it can show users. If job listings were a big part of your Proxycurl use, pair us with Coresignal or Crustdata, or pick one of them instead.

2. NinjaPear

Best for: Teams wanting the old Proxycurl price ladder.

Overview: NinjaPear is the new product from Nubela, the company that ran Proxycurl, pitched as real-time B2B data for AI agents. It sells company, person, work email and employee search endpoints plus a hosted MCP server, and says it does not scrape social networks for professional profiles.

Key features:

• Work email lookups at 2 credits when found and 0.5 when not.
• Employee search at 2 credits plus 1 per employee returned.
• A use_cache option that serves stored data up to 29 days old or forces a fresh fetch.

Pricing: Plans match Proxycurl's old ladder: $49 a month for 2,500 credits, then $299, $899 and $1,899, shown as an annual plan paid monthly. Subscription credits expire at the end of each billing period, and the trial is 3 days with 10 credits.

Pros: The same dollar tiers former Proxycurl users know, cheaper employee search and work email lookups than before, an MCP server

Cons: A person profile costs 3 credits where Proxycurl charged 1, even when nothing is found, plans carry a 12-month commitment, no phone endpoint in its docs

What it does differently: It's the shortest path for teams that liked how Proxycurl priced things and want the same company behind the API.

Final verdict: NinjaPear fits former Proxycurl customers who want continuity, as long as they budget for paid misses on person lookups.

3. People Data Labs

Best for: Big person and company record pulls.

Overview: People Data Labs, usually shortened to PDL, is one of the biggest suppliers of person and company records, sold through its API or as licensed data. The API side is refreshed once a month, and a person lookup can start from an email, a name or its own record ID.

Key features:

• Billing per match, so you never pay for a person it can't find.
• Person and company search, written like database queries.
• The free plan gets the API too, not just a dashboard.

Pricing: Person data on Pro runs from $98 a month, or $940 when you pay yearly, for 350 monthly credits with contact fields unmasked. Company data is billed on its own Pro plan, $100 monthly or $960 a year.

Pros: No charge on misses, very large person and company coverage, a free plan to test the schema against

Cons: The free plan masks emails and phones, person and company data need two plans, no official MCP server found

Why buyers shortlist it: Per-match billing makes it cheap to test on your real inputs before you commit to a plan.

Final verdict: Choose PDL for volume pulls where a monthly refresh is fresh enough.

4. Coresignal

Best for: Employee and company records with jobs.

Overview: Coresignal covers three kinds of record: employees, companies and job posts, through APIs or bulk datasets. Every API tier is priced on its site, from $49 up to $5,000 a month, and its docs take credits only when a fetch actually returns a record.

Key features:

• Separate employee, company and jobs APIs under a single login.
• Filter searches cost nothing; you pay when you pull the record.
• An MCP server, so AI assistants can query it.

Pricing: The ladder starts with Mini at $49 a month (2,500 credits), then Starter at $199 (12,000) and Pro at $499 (35,000). Pay yearly from Starter up and you save 10%, with the whole year's credits at once.

Pros: Job listings included, published prices on every tier, no charge for empty searches

Cons: 20 credits for each standard employee or company record, a 5-requests-a-second ceiling on Mini and Starter, monthly credits that reset unless you're on Premium or higher

Where it beats the rest: Jobs and employee records sit under one login, so it replaces Proxycurl's jobs endpoint and its profile lookups together.

Final verdict: Coresignal fits products that read hiring data as often as people data.

5. Crustdata

Best for: Tracking changes to people and companies.

Overview: Crustdata offers search and enrichment on people and companies, reachable by API or MCP server, and adds watchers: you name the people or companies to track, and it tells you when one of them changes. Its homepage cites 1B people and 60M companies.

Key features:

• Person enrichment priced 1 to 9 credits, rising as you ask for emails and phones.
• Monthly watchers bill 5 credits for each person who changed and nothing for a quiet run.
• A sandbox key that costs nothing to try.

Pricing: You won't see dollars on Crustdata's site. Its docs give the credit cost of each endpoint, plans are set with sales, and bought credits stay usable for 12 months.

Pros: Change alerts included, per-endpoint credit costs in public docs, credits that last a year

Cons: Prices only through a sales call, contact enrichment only on enterprise plans, daily watchers at 150 credits per change

Its real strength: If you built your own change tracking on top of Proxycurl data, Crustdata already does that work for you.

Final verdict: Crustdata is the pick when your feature is about what changed, not just what's true today.

6. Apollo.io

Best for: Sales teams that also want an API.

Overview: Apollo.io is a sales platform with a contact database, sequences and a dialer, and it exposes people and company enrichment through an API and an MCP server. It's priced per seat, which suits teams whose reps use the app as well as the API.

Key features:

• People enrichment at 1 credit for an email, plus 8 more when a mobile number comes back.
• Organization enrichment at 1 credit.
• No credits used when a request finds nothing billable.

Pricing: The free plan includes API access and 900 credits per seat a year. Basic is $49 for each seat monthly on a yearly plan, or $65 if you pay month to month, and Apollo's own FAQ says full API access sits on custom plans.

Pros: A real free plan, no charge on empty results, an app and an API in one subscription

Cons: Per-seat pricing that doesn't fit a backend job, daily API limits from 600 requests on Free, full API access only on custom plans

Why it made this list: Some Proxycurl users only needed emails for a sales team, and Apollo covers that with a user interface on top.

Final verdict: Apollo fits sales-led companies; product teams embedding data usually outgrow its seat model.

7. Explorium

Best for: Small prepaid budgets with an MCP server.

Overview: Explorium is pay-up-front: you buy a credit pack and spend it through its AgentSource API or MCP server on person and company enrichment, or on business events like a new funding round or an executive hire.

Key features:

• Each enrichment costs between 1 and 5 credits.
• Enroll a company and its events arrive at your webhook.
• 100 trial credits that stay valid for 90 days.

Pricing: Packs open at $29.99 (Lite, 500 credits), and the next step, Starter, is $149.99 for 5,000. Each pack is good for 12 months, and only a custom Enterprise deal lets you resell what you pull.

Pros: Credit packs from $29.99 with no subscription, an events feed, credits valid for a year

Cons: No refunds on credits, no resale rights below Enterprise, lookups stop at zero unless Auto-Refill is on

Where it fits: Prototypes and AI agents that need people and company data on a fixed budget.

Final verdict: Explorium works for testing an agent before you commit to a bigger contract.

What Proxycurl Alternatives Cost

Headline prices hide the two things that decide your bill: what happens on an empty result, and whether credits survive the month. The table puts Proxycurl's last published plan in the first row as a baseline.

Messy inputs make the fourth column the one to watch, since some lookups will miss no matter which vendor you pick. And if customers will see the results, budget for the right to display them too; with us that's the Platform plan, quoted on a call, and elsewhere, where the terms are published at all, it's a custom or Enterprise contract.

How to Replace Proxycurl Without Breaking Your Product

Replacing a vendor inside a working product is slower than opening a trial account, whichever of these Proxycurl competitors you pick. Budget a month or two of careful testing for a real integration, because nobody wants to switch twice.

Map Your Old Calls First

Start with your logs, not with vendor homepages. Search your codebase for every Proxycurl endpoint you called, note which fields your product read from each response, and count how many calls a month each one made.

Most teams find they used fewer fields than they thought. That list becomes your test brief, and it tells you which rows of the job table above matter to you.

Run a Side-by-Side Test

Here's the order we'd work in:

1. Export 200-500 real inputs from your Proxycurl logs, and add some people whose employer you know changed recently.
2. Run that exact list through two or three trials.
3. Keep three tallies per vendor: right person, wrong person, and nothing returned.
4. Note how old each matched record is, if the vendor tells you.
5. Line up each response against your own fields, keeping your existing record IDs so you can match old and new rows.
6. Work out credit needs from your measured hit rate rather than the pricing page.

Decide what counts as a pass before the first call goes out. A vendor that guesses a lot will win on match rate alone, yet one wrong person shown to a customer does more harm than a blank field.

Keep Records Fresh After the Switch

A profile is a snapshot, and the people in it keep moving. The U.S. Census Bureau found that 11.8% of people moved home in 2024. That's a home address, not a job, but it shows how fast the facts behind any record shift.

That's why the first fetch isn't the end of the job. Set a refresh rule for the records your users open most, and leave rarely viewed records alone until somebody opens one, the same way good CRM data enrichment handles decay.

How to Choose a Proxycurl Alternative

Start from what your product did with Proxycurl, not from a list of alternatives to Proxycurl. These four cases come up most.

You Turned Emails Into People

If signups or imported leads arrived as email addresses and you used Proxycurl to find out who was behind them, start your trials with Reverse Contact and People Data Labs. Apollo.io also covers it if a sales team is the main user.

You Showed Profiles Inside Your Product

When customers see the data, the license matters as much as the record. Our Platform contract is quoted on a call, and at People Data Labs, Coresignal and Explorium it's an enterprise or custom license, so get each one's display and resale terms in writing before you compare. Add Crustdata if users want to know when a profile changes.

You Needed Work Emails and Phones

If emails were the main job, Reverse Contact, NinjaPear and Apollo.io all cover it. We and Apollo.io charge nothing when no email is found, while NinjaPear charges half a credit.

Most of these vendors offer a phone lookup too, though NinjaPear doesn't. Reverse Contact charges 20 credits per lookup that finds a number and Apollo.io 8 extra credits per mobile, People Data Labs includes phones on paid plans, Explorium sells them as a contact enrichment, and Crustdata keeps them to enterprise plans. A phone often costs several times an email, so size credits from a test run of finding phone numbers on your own records.

You Read Job Listings or Company Data

Coresignal and Crustdata are built around job data, Apollo.io has a job postings endpoint, and People Data Labs offers one in beta if you ask for it. For company records without jobs, every vendor here works, and Explorium adds business events such as funding rounds.

Start With the Calls Your Product Made Most

You don't need to replace every Proxycurl endpoint on day one. Take your three most-called endpoints, pull a few hundred real inputs for each, and start running them through two of these alternatives to Proxycurl this week.

Count matches, wrong people and empty results, and note what each one would cost at your real volume. If emails and names are where your product starts, get a free API key and run the same list through Reverse Contact.

FAQ

Why did Proxycurl shut down?

LinkedIn sued Nubela and Proxycurl in January 2025, alleging the business was built on scraping its member data. Nubela shut Proxycurl down on July 4, 2025, saying it had to comply with a legal settlement, and the court entered a final judgment on consent on July 25, 2025.

What are the best Proxycurl alternatives?

The best Proxycurl alternatives depend on the jobs you used. If you start from emails or names, try Reverse Contact and People Data Labs. For the closest pricing match, NinjaPear comes from the former Proxycurl team. For job listings, look at Coresignal and Crustdata.

Is NinjaPear the same as Proxycurl?

No, but it comes from the same company. NinjaPear is Nubela's new product, and it uses the same plan ladder Proxycurl had, starting at $49 a month for 2,500 credits. Its endpoints and credit costs differ from Proxycurl's, though, so price your own mix of calls.

Which Proxycurl competitors have an MCP server?

Reverse Contact, NinjaPear, Coresignal, Crustdata, Apollo.io and Explorium all publish an MCP server that AI assistants such as Claude can call. People Data Labs has community-built servers, but we found no official one.

Do Proxycurl alternatives charge for empty results?

It depends on the vendor and the call. People Data Labs, Coresignal and Apollo.io bill only when data comes back, and we don't charge for a lookup, enrichment, standard search, email or phone lookup that finds nothing; only an agentic search page that finds no one costs 1 credit. NinjaPear charges 3 credits for a person profile call even when it finds nothing.