Hunter

What it is

Hunter is a self-serve email finder and verifier built around the company domain. You type a domain and get the public work addresses Hunter has indexed for it, with the sources it found them on (Domain Search). You type a name and a domain and get that person’s most likely address with a confidence score (Email Finder). Or you paste a list and get each address checked (Email Verifier). Around that core it adds Discover (company search with filters), person and company enrichment, a Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension, a Google Sheets add-on, and Campaigns, a light cold-email sender that runs sequences from your own Gmail or Outlook inbox. Hunter was founded in 2015 by Antoine Finkelstein and François Grante, works fully remote, and reports 7 million user accounts and 81 million websites indexed.

What it is not: a phone-data source or a full contact database. The API has phone fields, but Hunter does not sell mobile coverage, and its strength is domain-based email discovery, not people search across hundreds of filters. It is also a single source. When Hunter has no address for someone, nothing else is queried behind it.

Why it shows up in RevOps stacks

• Unlimited seats on every plan. Hunter prices the credit pool, not the user. A 10-person team on Growth pays one subscription, where per-seat tools like Prospeo or Apollo bill each rep. That makes it the default “everyone gets a login” email finder for marketing, partnerships, recruiting, and sales in the same company.
• Verification is built in and cheap. A verification costs 0.5 credit, failed verifications and “unknown” results cost nothing, and repeated lookups of the same address count once per billing period. The six statuses (valid, invalid, accept_all, webmail, disposable, unknown) are explicit enough to drive routing rules in a CRM.
• Sources shown per address. Domain Search lists the pages where each email appeared. That is the fastest way for a rep to sanity-check an address before sending, and the reason Hunter is still the tool people open by hand.
• API and MCP on every plan, including free. The REST API covers Discover, Domain Search, Email Finder, Email Verifier, enrichment, and leads, rate-limited at 15 requests per second for search and enrichment and 10 per second for verification. The official MCP server (https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp, API key or OAuth) exposes the same tools to Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini at no extra cost. Native integrations cover HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zapier, Make, Clay, and Snowflake.

Pricing

Checked 2026-10-18 on hunter.io/pricing, which quoted prices in euros. Every plan includes unlimited team members sharing one credit pool.

• Free — €0, 50 credits a month, 1 connected email account, 500 recipients per campaign.
• Starter — €49 a month (2,000 credits), or €408 a year (€34 a month) with 24,000 credits delivered upfront. 3 connected accounts, 2,500 recipients. Adds auto-verification, enrichment, and advanced Discover filters.
• Growth — €149 a month (10,000 credits), or €1,248 a year (€104 a month) with 120,000 credits. 10 connected accounts, 5,000 recipients.
• Scale — €299 a month (25,000 credits), or €2,508 a year (€209 a month) with 300,000 credits. 20 connected accounts, 15,000 recipients, an account manager.
• Enterprise — custom. A separate API-only Data Platform sells credits in bulk, valid for 12 months; Hunter’s example is $6,500 for 1,000 search credits plus 200,000 verification credits.
• What a credit buys. One found email (Domain Search, Email Finder, Bulk Email Finder) costs 1 credit; Bulk Domain Search costs 1 credit per up to 10 emails found; a verification costs 0.5 credit. Failed searches are free.
• What it costs in practice. On Starter monthly, a found email costs about €0.025 and a verification about €0.012 (€12.25 per 1,000). On Growth annual, those drop to about €0.010 and €0.005. Instantly’s 2026 Email Verification Benchmark (2026-01-31) lists Hunter at about $24.50 per 1,000 verifications, which matches Starter’s cost per found email, not per verification; use the credit math above. For a 10-person team, Growth annual at €1,248 total compares with about $8,880 for 10 Prospeo Growth seats, though Prospeo also includes mobiles.

Best for

• Marketing, partnerships, and small-team sales leads who need a shared email finder and verifier for 3 to 30 people without per-seat billing
• RevOps teams that want a cheap verification step in front of sequencing, called from HubSpot, Salesforce, Clay, Zapier, or an MCP-connected agent
• Founders and agencies running low-volume, domain-led outreach from their own inboxes with Campaigns
• Not for phone-first outbound (use Lusha or Prospeo); not for filter-heavy people search or intent (use Apollo or ZoomInfo); not for high-volume cold email across many inboxes (use Instantly or Smartlead)

Alternatives — and when to pick them instead

• ZoomInfo — the category’s share leader: the deepest database, intent data, and org charts, on custom annual contracts. Pick ZoomInfo when account intelligence and direct dials are the job. Pick Hunter when the job is a verified work email at a published price.
• Apollo — the other share leader, bundling a contact database, sequences, and a dialer from $49 per seat per month on annual billing, with API and MCP on the free plan. Pick Apollo when one seat has to search, sequence, and call. Pick Hunter when many people need occasional email lookups and per-seat billing would waste money.
• Clay — the fastest-growing platform here. It orchestrates many providers in a waterfall, and Hunter is one of them. Pick Clay when you need provider order and fallback under your control. Pick Hunter directly when one source covers your segment.
• Prospeo — per-seat credits with a 7-day data refresh and mobiles at 10 credits. Pick Prospeo for SDR seats that need both emails and phone numbers. Pick Hunter for a shared, email-only pool.
• FullEnrich — a packaged waterfall across 20+ providers that charges only for hits. Pick FullEnrich for the contacts Hunter misses; a single source can’t find what it hasn’t indexed.

Watch-outs

• One pool, unlimited users. Unlimited seats mean one teammate’s bulk job can empty the month’s credits for everyone. Guard: run bulk Domain Search and Bulk Email Finder jobs from a single owner account, and push automated enrichment through the API or Zapier with a daily cap instead of handing bulk tools to every user.
• accept_all is not valid. Catch-all domains accept any address, so Hunter can’t confirm the mailbox exists, and reviewers consistently report weaker accuracy there. Guard: send valid addresses normally, route accept_all to a second verifier such as ZeroBounce or into a small test batch, and suppress anything that bounces.
• Credits expire. Monthly credits reset every month and annual credits reset at renewal; nothing rolls over. Guard: run the first two months on monthly billing, measure actual burn, then size the annual plan to that number.
• Coverage thins at small companies. Domain-based discovery works best where a company has a public web footprint; small firms and non-English-language markets return fewer addresses. Guard: before buying, run 200 contacts from your real target list through Hunter’s free plan and one competitor, and compare hit rate and first-send bounce rate, not the tools’ own confidence labels.
• Campaigns is light. Scale connects 20 inboxes (extra slots are paid add-ons), well short of the inbox counts that outbound agencies rotate through dedicated cold-email platforms. Guard: use Campaigns for founder-led or partnership outreach, and send volume outbound through a dedicated sender like Instantly or Smartlead, with Hunter only verifying the list.