What it is

Ocean.io is an account-discovery engine. You give it one or more seed domains, usually your best customers, and it returns companies that look like them. You can then filter the list by size, location, industry, technologies and keywords. It sits in the same prospecting category as Clay and Apollo, but it starts from the company graph, not from the contact. Contacts, verified emails and direct phone numbers are a second step, paid per record.

Michael Heiberg founded the company in Copenhagen in 2017, and Ocean.io says it shipped its first B2B lookalike search in 2019. It raised €6 million in January 2022 in a round led by Peak to expand into the US. Its legal address is now Ocean Global, Inc. in San Francisco. It is still independent: we found no acquisition or wind-down news from the past 12 months.

The question this page answers: Clay’s March 11, 2026 pricing change put self-serve buyers on Launch at $185/month or Growth at $495/month, and split credits into Data Credits and Actions. If you mostly used Clay to build the account list, is there a cheaper tool for that one job? Ocean.io is the one we would shortlist first.

Why it shows up in RevOps stacks

Lookalike search is the product, not a feature. Seed it with closed-won domains and you get a ranked list back. Most contact databases add similarity on top of filters. Ocean.io builds the list from similarity first.
Search is cheap per account. A company search result costs 0.2 credits, a batch company enrichment 0.1 and a domain lookup 0.05. Account-level list building barely moves the bill. Emails (1 credit) and phone numbers (10 credits) are what cost money.
One credit pool across the app, API, MCP, webhooks and Clay. The same balance pays for the web app, the REST API and Ocean.io’s own MCP server, which works with Claude, Claude Code and Cursor. MCP calls cost the same as the equivalent REST calls, and exports ask for confirmation before they run.
It already works inside Clay. Ocean.io is a data provider in Clay, so a team can keep Clay for enrichment and orchestration and move only the discovery step.
CRM sync. Native integrations with HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce, and unlimited users on every plan.

Pricing reality

Ocean.io sells credits, not seats or tiers. On the pricing page as checked on 2026-09-13, pay-as-you-go costs $0.069 per credit with a 1,000-credit minimum (about $69), and those credits expire after 3 months. The yearly subscription costs $0.063 per credit with a 9,000-credit minimum: $567 a year, or $47.25 a month. A monthly subscription sits between the two. Older reviews quote Starter ($79/month) and Professional ($299/month) plans. Those plans are no longer on the pricing page.

What a team spends depends on how many contacts it reveals, not how many accounts it finds. Worked examples at the yearly rate:

Discovery only: 1,000 lookalike accounts a month is 200 credits, or 2,400 a year. That fits inside the $567 minimum.
Discovery plus light contacting: 5,000 accounts, 300 emails and 30 phone numbers a month is 1,600 credits a month, about $1,210 a year.
Phone-heavy SDR use: 1,000 phone numbers a month is 10,000 credits a month, about $7,560 a year. At that volume you are buying a contact database, so price it against one.

No public contract benchmark exists (Vendr has none), so this band is our calculation from list prices. For comparison, Clay Launch billed annually is $2,004 a year ($167/month), so Ocean.io’s yearly minimum is about 28% of Clay’s entry paid plan. Larger commitments are quoted on request.

Best for

RevOps and growth leads at B2B companies with 20 to 300 employees and a clear set of best customers. They rebuild a TAM or ABM target list every quarter, and most of their Clay bill pays for account discovery.

Not for you if you want one vendor for accurate contact data at volume, or if your ICP is defined by signals (hiring, tech adoption, funding) more than by resemblance to current customers. It is also the wrong buy if you have fewer than about 10 closed-won customers in one segment: lookalike search needs good seeds.

Versus the alternatives

ZoomInfo is the largest B2B data vendor by revenue. Pick it when you need US contact depth, intent and org charts under one enterprise contract. Pick Ocean.io when you need the account list and the budget is hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands.
Apollo is the default low-cost database with sequencing built in. Pick it when reps need contacts and outreach in one tool. Pick Ocean.io when list quality depends on similarity to your best customers, not on filter combinations.
Clay is the orchestration layer. Keep it for multi-provider waterfalls and AI research columns. Move discovery to Ocean.io when that step is most of your Data Credit spend. The two work together.
Sumble is the fastest-growing entrant. It came out of stealth in October 2025 with $38.5 million led by Canaan and Coatue. Pick it when you target accounts by what they are building: tech stack, teams, live projects. Pick Ocean.io when you target by resemblance to your customers.

If none of these fits, the problem is probably the ICP, not the tool. Write down the three attributes your best 20 customers share. If you can’t, no lookalike engine will fix it. Start with ICP definition.

Watch-outs

Contact data is the weak layer. Ocean.io scores 4.2/5 on Capterra from 17 reviews but sits in the low 3s on G2 from about a dozen, and the complaints repeat: bounced emails, stale phone numbers, missing key people. Guard: buy accounts from Ocean.io. Before you rely on its contacts, reveal 200 and compare the bounce rate with your current provider.
Bad seeds give bad lists. Ocean.io’s own docs warn that poor seed domains return poor results, and a June 2026 Capterra reviewer said about 80% of the returned companies missed their ICP. Guard: seed with 10 to 20 closed-won domains from a single segment, pull 100 results and score them by hand before you scale.
No corporate hierarchy. Reviewers report working out parent vs subsidiary themselves. Guard: match results against CRM accounts with the Lookup endpoint (0.05 credits per record) and dedupe on the parent domain before import.
Credits expire and subscriptions auto-renew. Pay-as-you-go credits last 3 months and yearly credits 12 months, and monthly rollover credits are lost when you cancel. Renewal is automatic, with no refunds for partial periods. Guard: test with a 1,000-credit pay-as-you-go pack first, and set a reminder 30 days before renewal.
Agents burn search credits. Every result an AI agent pages through costs 0.2 credits. Guard: cap the result size in your prompts, and read the cost the MCP export confirmation shows before you approve it.

Edit this page on GitHub