Crustdata

What it is

Crustdata is a B2B people and company data API built to be called by software, and increasingly by AI agents, rather than browsed by reps. It claims profiles on more than 1 billion people and 60 million companies, assembled from 11+ sources, and exposes them through search, enrichment, jobs, social-post, and web-search endpoints, plus “Watcher” webhooks that fire when a person changes jobs or a company starts hiring. A hosted MCP server at https://install.crustdata.com/mcp puts the same data inside Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, and VS Code. The company came out of Y Combinator, closed a $6M seed co-led by Y Combinator and A Capital in October 2025, and now states $10M in ARR on its homepage.

What it is not: a prospecting app. There is no list builder, no sequencer, no Chrome extension, and no CRM sync. If nobody on your team writes code or runs an agent, Crustdata has nothing to show you.

Why it shows up in RevOps stacks

• It is the data layer under agent-built prospecting. A practitioner on r/recruiting described an MCP stack where Claude plans the search and Crustdata answers it. The search tools take structured filters (title, seniority, company, headcount, funding, skills), so an agent can turn “VPs of Sales at Series B fintechs in London” into one call instead of scraping.
• Search is cheap; enrichment is where you pay. Search costs 0.03 credits per result and empty searches are free, so 1,000 matching people cost 30 credits. Enriching a person costs 1 credit for the base profile plus add-ons: +1 business email, +2 personal email, +2 phone, up to +3 for developer-platform and research-profile data. Narrow with search, enrich only the shortlist.
• Two freshness modes, priced apart. Default endpoints read Crustdata’s cached graph. Live endpoints re-fetch the record at request time (7 credits per person enrich, 2 per profile on live search) and are plan-gated. A 42agency test cited by DataForB2B found cached sources, Crustdata’s included, still showing an old employer two weeks after a job change, while live lookups were correct.
• Signals, not just records. Watchers bill only for what they deliver: 0.5 credits per new person or job on a 30-day SLA, 5 per changed person, and up to 150 per record on a 1-day SLA. That is a job-change or hiring-trigger feed you can point at a CRM or an n8n flow.

Pricing

Checked 2026-10-10 on crustdata.com/pricing and docs.crustdata.com/general/pricing:

• Plan prices are not published. The pricing page shows credit-based API plans, monthly flat-file datasets (CSV or JSON), and custom enterprise deals, all behind a demo. Crustdata’s own July 2026 cost guide puts the lowest tier at $95 a month, and says the dollar value of a credit is set by plan.
• Credit costs are published. Search 0.03 per result plus small charges for premium fields (0.1 to 2.5); company enrich 2, or 4 with technographics; person enrich 1 to 9; live person enrich 7; batch person verification 10 per result. GET /account/endpoints returns your negotiated rates for free.
• Gates. Live endpoints are plan-gated, and contact enrichment on /person/contact/enrich is listed as Enterprise-only, so a self-serve plan reads the cached graph.
• Expiry. The docs say purchased credits last 12 months; the July cost guide said 6. Get the term written into the order form.
• What it costs in practice. Searching 20,000 people and enriching the best 2,000 with a business email is 600 + 4,000 = 4,600 credits. Adding phone and personal email to those 2,000 brings the enrichment to 12,000 credits. Contact fields, not search, set the bill. Ask for the per-credit dollar rate before you build, because without it you cannot compare this against a per-record price from anyone else.

Best for

• GTM engineers and RevOps builders at seed-to-Series-C companies who are wiring people and company data into an agent, an internal tool, or their own product, and want to pay per call instead of per seat
• Teams that need job-change and hiring signals as webhooks rather than as a dashboard someone has to check
• Recruiting-tech and investor-sourcing builders who need people search with skills, education, and GitHub filters
• Not for sales teams that want a UI to build lists and send emails (use Apollo); not for teams that need verified mobile numbers at scale (use a waterfall like FullEnrich); and not for a security review that requires SOC 2, which Crustdata does not claim on its public site

Alternatives — and when to pick them instead

• ZoomInfo — the category’s share leader, with intent data and org charts, on custom contracts that Crustdata’s cost guide puts at a median near $33,500 a year (Vendr). Pick ZoomInfo when legal and procurement need a large, audited vendor and reps need the UI. Pick Crustdata when an agent is the main consumer and seat pricing makes no sense.
• Apollo — the other share leader: database, sequencing, and dialer from $49 per seat per month on annual billing, with an API. Pick Apollo when people, not code, do the prospecting.
• People Data Labs — the longest-running people-data API: 100 free credits a month with contact fields hidden, then Pro from $98 a month for 350 credits (about $0.28 a record). Pick PDL when you want published per-record prices and a mature bulk license. Pick Crustdata when you need live refresh, posts, and watchers in the same API.
• Coresignal — public self-serve pricing from $49 a month for 2,500 credits, with a multi-source employee or company record at 20 credits, and volume tiers down to fractions of a cent. Pick Coresignal for large historical datasets where price per record decides. Pick Crustdata for real-time triggers.
• Clay — the fastest-growing platform in the segment, which raised a $115M Series D at a $7.1B valuation in September 2026. Pick Clay when a person, not an agent, designs the enrichment and you want a table, waterfalls, and CRM sync. Pick Crustdata when the work runs in code. Recruiters who want a search UI rather than an API should look at Juicebox.

Watch-outs

• Professional-network data carries platform risk. Crustdata does not name its sources, but its posts API reads “a professional network.” LinkedIn sued Proxycurl in January 2025, and Proxycurl shut down on 2025-07-04 under an injunction that required it to notify its customers and delete the data. Guard: get a sourcing and indemnity clause in the contract, store Crustdata record IDs next to your own copy of the data, and keep a second provider tested so you can switch in a week.
• Cached data lags job changes. Default enrichment reads a cache, and the freshness test above caught stale employers two weeks out. Guard: use live endpoints or a person Watcher for any record that triggers outreach, and cached reads only for scoring and research.
• Rate limits are low for bulk work. The docs list defaults from 10 requests per minute on live endpoints to 45 on autocomplete. At the 15 a minute that DataForB2B reports for cached enrichment, 10,000 single enrichments take more than 11 hours. Guard: use the batch endpoints, and get higher limits in writing before a backfill.
• No public reviews and no compliance claims. G2 shows zero reviews, and the site lists terms and a privacy policy but no SOC 2 or ISO report. Guard: run 200 of your own records through the free developer sandbox and compare hit rate and freshness against PDL or Coresignal, then send the security questionnaire before the agent goes near production CRM data.