THE CRUSTDATA ALTERNATIVE
Live Profiles Without an Enterprise Add-On
Crustdata answers most calls from its indexed database and sells live fetches as a plan-gated add-on at 7 credits a profile. Datamagnet fetches every profile from the page at request time, for 1 credit, on every plan.
- Crustdata's live person enrich, plan-gated
- 7 creditsCrustdata's live person enrich, plan-gated
- Crustdata default limit on live endpoints
- 10 RPMCrustdata default limit on live endpoints
- Per live Datamagnet profile, every plan
- 1 creditPer live Datamagnet profile, every plan
Datamagnet vs Crustdata: the short answer
Crustdata and Datamagnet are both people and company data APIs, built on different defaults. Crustdata serves most requests from an indexed database — person enrich at 1–7 credits, company enrich at 2–4, search at 0.03 credits per result — and sells live profile fetches as a plan-gated add-on at 7 credits, capped at 10 requests a minute by default. Datamagnet fetches every profile live for 1 credit on every plan. Choose Crustdata for deep company data, contact details and cheap bulk search. Choose Datamagnet when each profile must be current and you want published prices.
Our verdict
Crustdata is the broader data product. Its company records carry headcount history, funding, web traffic, employee reviews and technographics; its enterprise plans add emails and phone numbers; and its search is priced for bulk discovery at 0.03 credits a result. Where it is weaker is the live path. Live person enrichment is an add-on, costs seven times a database lookup, and defaults to 10 requests a minute, while indexed post search can lag by days. Its dollar-per-credit rate is not published. Datamagnet is the better fit when the product acts on individual profiles that have to be right today.
Which one should you pick?
Straight guidance, including the cases where we're the wrong answer.
Choose Datamagnet if
- Every profile has to be current at the moment you read it, without buying a live-enrichment add-on
- You want to know the dollar cost of a lookup before a sales call — our plans and per-endpoint credit costs are published
- You need recent post content and the commenters, reactors and reposters behind it, not an index that can lag by days
- You want a Sales Navigator search URL turned into structured results
- You want job-change and engagement signals by webhook from a $199 self-serve plan
Choose Crustdata if
- You need company depth — headcount time series, funding and investors, web traffic, employee reviews and technographics
- You need business emails, personal emails or phone numbers on the record, and can qualify for an enterprise plan
- You run bulk discovery where 0.03 credits per search result beats paging through live search
- You want watchers on company changes — headcount, funding, hiring, news — delivered to Slack, Google Chat, email or webhook
- You need job-listing search or flat-file company and people datasets alongside the API
- Your inputs are emails or company names rather than LinkedIn URLs
Datamagnet vs Crustdata, feature by feature
What each tool actually returns, how fresh it is, and what it costs to run.
Data & API coverage
| Feature | Datamagnet | Crustdata |
|---|---|---|
| Live fetch on person enrichment | Default, 1 credit | Plan-gated add-on, 7 credits |
| Database person enrichment | Not offered — always live | 1–7 credits by fields requested |
| Default rate limit on live calls | Up to 30 req/min | 10 req/min |
| Company enrichment input | LinkedIn URL | Domain, LinkedIn URL, name or ID |
| People and company search | 10 credits per page of 25 | 0.03 credits per result |
| Sales Navigator URL search | Yes | No |
| Post content & engagement identities | Live, commenters + reactors + reposters | Indexed search off by default; live enrich per 100 |
| Funding rounds data | Yes | Yes |
| Person change monitoring | 6 signal types, webhook or email | Entity watchers, 5–150 credits per change |
| Published dollar pricing | $39 / $99 / $199 plans | Credits; dollar rate set by plan |
| Hosted MCP server | Yes | Yes |
| Headcount history, web traffic, employee reviews | No | Yes |
| Emails & phone numbers | No | Enterprise or higher-tier plans |
| Job listing search | No | Yes |
| Flat-file datasets & scheduled exports | No | Yes |
Freshness
| Feature | Datamagnet | Crustdata |
|---|---|---|
| Default read path | Fetched from the page per request | Indexed database |
| Getting a guaranteed-fresh profile | Every call, 1 credit | Live endpoint, 7 credits, plan-gated |
| New-post detection | Within minutes via signals | Indexed posts can lag by days |
| Job-change detection | Continuous signals + webhooks | Watcher freshness from 30 days to daily |
Crustdata capabilities are summarized from their public documentation and pricing pages, last checked September 2026. Products change — verify against their current offering before you buy.
Crustdata has live data. It is priced as the exception.
Crustdata markets itself as real-time, and it does have live endpoints: live person enrich, live people and company search, live post enrich. What its own docs make clear is how they sit in the product. The default person enrich reads from Crustdata's index; the live version is an add-on your plan has to include, costs 7 credits against 1 for the database read, is capped at 300 profiles per batch job, and defaults to 10 requests a minute. Its watchers price freshness the same way — a changed person costs 5 credits at 30-day freshness and 150 at daily. With Datamagnet there is no second tier: the live fetch is the only fetch.
- Enrich — POST a LinkedIn URL and get the profile as it is on the page right now, 1 credit
- Search — ICP search, live people search, or a Sales Navigator URL returns net-new matches
- Watch — six signal types push job changes and engagement to an HMAC-signed webhook
Pricing, side by side
What you pay Crustdata versus what you pay us, for the same work.
Crustdata
Credit-based self-serve and enterprise plans. Per-endpoint credit costs are published; the dollar value of a credit is set by plan and not listed on the pricing page.
- Person enrich (database)Base profile 1; emails and phone add credits
- 1–7 credits
- Person enrich (live)Plan-gated add-on
- 7 credits
- Company enrichTechnographics add 2
- 2–4 credits
- People / company searchAutocomplete endpoints free
- 0.03 credits/result
- Person entity watcherPer changed person, by freshness
- 5–150 credits
- Flat-file datasetsSample on request, refreshed monthly
- Custom
Datamagnet
Credits, not seats. Charged only on successful requests, and 10 free credits to test before you pay anything.
- FreeOn signup, no card
- 10 credits
- Starter1,000 credits/mo
- $39/mo
- Pro10,000 credits/mo
- $99/mo
- Scale25,000 credits/mo · webhooks + bulk export
- $199/mo
- Pay-as-you-go200 credits $10 → 100,000 credits $2,000
- from $0.02/credit
Crustdata's docs say purchased credits are valid for 12 months; a July 2026 Crustdata blog post says six. Crustdata does not bill unmatched identifiers or zero-result searches; Datamagnet charges only on successful requests. Competitor pricing is taken from their public pricing page and was last checked September 2026; list prices change and negotiated rates differ. See Datamagnet pricing for our current plans.
Where each tool genuinely wins
No tool wins everywhere. Here's the honest split.
Where Crustdata wins
- Company depth we do not have: headcount time series, funding and investors, web traffic, employee reviews, technographics and news on one record
- Business emails, personal emails and phone numbers with deliverability status, plus reverse email lookup, on enterprise plans — Datamagnet returns none of these
- Search priced for bulk discovery at 0.03 credits per result, with batch database enrichment of up to 10,000 profiles per job
- Company watchers for headcount, funding, hiring, news and follower changes, delivered to webhook, Slack, Google Chat or email
- Job-listing search, flat-file company and people datasets, and scheduled CSV or JSONL exports from the dashboard
- Company enrichment from a domain, name or LinkedIn URL, where Datamagnet needs the LinkedIn URL
- A Zapier integration and listings across Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other agent directories
Where Datamagnet wins
- Every profile fetched live at request time on every plan, for 1 credit rather than 7
- Live calls up to 30 requests a minute against a 10 RPM default on Crustdata live endpoints
- Published dollar pricing — $39, $99 and $199 plans or pay-as-you-go — with no sales call to learn the rate
- Post engagement identities for commenters, reactors and reposters returned live, not from an index that can lag by days
- Sales Navigator search URLs converted directly into structured results
- Six signal types covering job changes, new posts and keyword, industry, company and person engagement
- Charged only on successful requests, with 10 free credits and no card to start
Datamagnet vs Crustdata: FAQ
Sources
Every competitor claim on this page traces back to one of these.
- 1.Crustdata docs — Credit pricing per endpoint (search 0.03, person enrich 1–7, company enrich 2–4, live enrich 7, watchers, 12-month credit validity) — checked September 2026
- 2.Crustdata docs — Rate limits (person enrich 15 RPM, search 30 RPM, live endpoints 10 RPM) — checked September 2026
- 3.Crustdata — Pricing page (credit-based tiers, monthly and annual plans, flat files refreshed monthly) — checked September 2026
- 4.Crustdata blog — Data enrichment cost (dollar value per credit set by plan; unmatched lookups not billed) — checked September 2026
- 5.Crustdata docs — Batch person enrichment (10,000 per database job; live enrichment is an add-on, 300 per job) — checked September 2026
- 6.Crustdata docs — Person contact enrichment (emails and phones; enterprise or higher-tier plans, self-serve keys receive 403) — checked September 2026
- 7.Crustdata docs — Company enrichment (domain, LinkedIn URL, name or ID; headcount, funding, web traffic, reviews, technographics) — checked September 2026
- 8.Crustdata docs — Indexed social post search (rebuilt periodically, can lag by days; off by default) — checked September 2026
- 9.Crustdata docs — Person entity watcher (5–150 credits per change by freshness; webhook, Slack, Google Chat, email) — checked September 2026
- 10.Crustdata docs — Company entity watcher (headcount, funding, news, hiring and follower changes) — checked September 2026
- 11.Crustdata docs — Data export (CSV or JSONL, scheduled from the dashboard) — checked September 2026
- 12.Crustdata docs — MCP server and integrations (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Zapier) — checked September 2026
- 13.Crustdata blog — $6M seed round led by Y Combinator and A Capital (Oct 2025) — checked September 2026
- 14.Coresignal — Datasets and Data APIs Pricing (Starter from $49/mo) — checked July 2026
- 15.Datamagnet — pricing and credit costs — checked September 2026
Try Datamagnet against Crustdata on your own data
10 free credits, no credit card. Run the same lookups through both and compare the JSON yourself.
- Live data at request time
- Charged only on success
- No seats, no annual contract
Interactive Demo
~15 minutes
Get your API key
1 minEnrich a test record
2 minWire into your stack
Same day