Clearbit Forms Alternative: Shorter Forms With Enrichment

If you used Clearbit Forms to shorten sign-up forms, you now have two realistic paths: use HubSpot’s built-in form features if you subscribe, or enrich on submit with a company lookup API behind your own form. The second is a small amount of code and keeps you in control.

What form shortening does

The idea is simple. Each extra field costs conversions, but sales still wants to know company size and industry. So the form asks for a work email, and the system derives the rest from the domain after the fact. The visitor sees a short form; the lead record still arrives complete enough to route.

Two things changed with Clearbit’s wind-down. First, the free tooling that many small teams used ended; HubSpot’s community announcement lists the free Clearbit platform as ending on April 30, 2025. Second, enrichment now sits inside paid HubSpot subscriptions. BusinessMCP’s Clearbit API alternative comparison states that for HubSpot users, Breeze enrichment is included, costs no credits for standard enrichment and writes directly into records, including form shortening. If that is your stack, you may need no replacement at all.

Your options

Approach	Effort	Cost model	Best when
HubSpot built-in	Low	Part of subscription	You already use HubSpot
Server-side lookup on submit	Medium	Per found company	Custom forms, any CRM
Client-side enrichment script	Medium	Varies	You want live field pre-fill
Ask the extra questions	None	Conversion cost	Low volume, high intent

Building it yourself: the on-submit pattern

For custom forms, the cleanest design enriches after submit, not while the visitor types.

1. Validate the email and extract the domain.
2. Skip personal and free-mail domains. If the domain belongs to a mailbox provider, there is no company to find.
3. Call a company lookup with the domain, on your server, never from the browser, so the API key stays private.
4. Save the returned fields next to the lead, with a timestamp and a source label.
5. If nothing is found, keep the lead anyway and queue a manual or follow-up question.

BusinessMCP’s company data API fits step 3. Per its page, a lookup is GET /api/hub/v1/companies/{domain} with a Bearer key, charged at $0.02 only when a company is found, and a miss returns found=false without charge. That last property is what makes on-submit enrichment affordable on forms where many sign-ups use free mail.

curl https://businessmcp.com/api/hub/v1/companies/stripe.com \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BUSINESSMCP_API_KEY"

The page does not publish a full sample response body in the sections we read, so check the API reference for exact field names before mapping them.

Key takeaway: enrich after submit on the server, skip free-mail domains, and never let a failed lookup block the sign-up.

What you will not get

Be clear about gaps. A domain lookup cannot tell you who the person is, their job title or whether they have budget. BusinessMCP’s own page states company-level data only for this endpoint, and its people tools carry restrictions: card required, no free-trial spend, and no people in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland, nor in four named US states. So routing on seniority needs another source or a form field. For routing on company size and country alone, a lookup is usually enough.

Using the data in routing

Once you have employee range and country, simple rules go a long way:

• Route larger accounts to a human within a defined window.
• Send small accounts to a self-serve nurture sequence.
• Flag unknown companies for a quick manual review rather than discarding them.

These rules are the front half of a scoring model; see lead scoring without Clearbit for the next step. Keep the thresholds in configuration so sales can change them without a deploy.

Privacy and honesty with your users

Enriching a lead from their email is processing, and your privacy notice should say so. Describe the categories of data you add and where they come from. Where you operate in regions with strict rules, get advice on lawful basis. The CRM-hygiene angle helps too: BusinessMCP has a CRM data hygiene guide on keeping enriched fields from rotting, which matters because company data goes stale.

Which path to choose

If you use HubSpot, check what your tier includes. If you have a custom form and engineering time, the on-submit pattern costs almost nothing at low volume. If you have neither, the honest alternative is to ask the two or three questions you need and measure the conversion impact before spending anything. For the wider vendor picture, see alternatives for data enrichment.

Edge cases worth handling

Form enrichment looks trivial until real sign-ups arrive. A few cases come up on almost every site.

• Plus-addressing and aliases. Addresses such as [email protected] still carry the company domain, so strip nothing but the mailbox before extracting the domain.
• Free-mail and student addresses. Skip lookup entirely and mark the lead as individual or personal, then ask for the company name in a follow-up field if you need it.
• Consultants and agencies. A freelancer using a client’s address resolves to the client. Your rules should treat enrichment as a hint, not a fact.
• Typos. A mistyped domain returns a miss. Do not retry in a loop, because a miss is a legitimate answer and BusinessMCP does not charge for it, but retries still cost time and rate limit.
• Very new companies. A lookup may return nothing for a business founded last month. Route those to a human instead of dropping them.

Measuring whether shorter forms help

Do not assume fewer fields means more revenue. Run a simple test.

1. Split traffic between the long form and the short form for at least a few weeks, depending on volume.
2. Track completed sign-ups, but also qualified leads, since a short form can raise volume and lower quality.
3. Compare the share of leads that end up with usable company data, because enrichment misses reduce the benefit.
4. Check support and sales feedback about lead quality before declaring a winner.

If the short form lifts sign-ups but your reps complain about unqualified contacts, the saving was an illusion. The point of enrichment is to keep the sales-relevant information while removing friction for the visitor, so measure both. For a detailed look at the vendor side, the comparison of company data APIs lists what each option returns and what it costs, which helps you decide whether on-submit enrichment fits your budget.