Free Alternatives to Clearbit: What Zero Cost Gets You

There is no complete free replacement for Clearbit, but you can cover small needs at no cost: one-time trial credits for testing an API, monthly free tiers for light use, and free lookup tools for single domains. Anything at volume will cost money, so use free options to decide, not to run production.

What disappeared, and what is left

The free Clearbit platform, weekly visitor report and Clearbit Connect were listed by HubSpot as ending on April 30, 2025, and the free Logo API followed later; our timeline of what changed has the details. That removed the easy answer for hobby projects and early-stage teams. What remains is a patchwork.

BusinessMCP’s company data API comparison, which states its prices were checked between September 28 and October 7, 2026, lists these free options:

Option	What is free	Best for	Limit to note
Hunter	50 credits per month	Email finding	Paid plans start at $49 per month
ZoomInfo GTM.AI	1,000 data credits and 1,000 AI credits	Evaluating contact data	Credits expire after 12 months
IPinfo Lite	Country-level IP data	Geolocation	Company field is on Enterprise
Wappalyzer	50 lookups per month	Technographics	Pro is $250 per month
BusinessMCP	$5 for 7 days, once	Testing company, IP and email checks	Not a recurring free tier

As always, vendor-reported numbers should be checked on the vendors’ own pages.

The one-time credit approach

A trial credit suits the job most people actually have: deciding which provider to adopt. BusinessMCP’s company lookup bills $0.02 per company found and nothing on a miss, so $5 of credit funds a meaningful test. You can also try single domains without code through the free company lookup tool.

The catch is that the credit is limited in time. Seven days is short, so prepare your sample before you sign up:

1. Export 200 to 300 domains from your CRM.
2. Write the script that calls the API and saves raw responses.
3. Only then claim the credit and run it.
4. Spot-check results by hand the same day.

Key takeaway: free credit expires, so do the preparation first. A rushed test wastes the one chance you get.

Free tiers and light production

Monthly free tiers can carry real, small workloads: a side project enriching a few dozen sign-ups a month, or an internal tool used by a handful of people. Their weakness is dependency. You are building on a limit the vendor can lower. Isolate the call behind one function, log every response and keep a manual fallback.

Free tools for single lookups

Sometimes you do not need an API; you need to look up one company. Browser-based tools suffice for that, and they carry no commitment. For IP-based questions, BusinessMCP also offers a reverse IP lookup tool. Keep in mind that free web tools are rate limited and are not designed to be scraped.

Build-your-own at zero cost

If you have engineering time but no budget, public registries and company websites contain a lot of the same basics. The cost is not money but upkeep: parsing, matching, deduplication and freshness are the hard parts, and the result rarely reaches the coverage of a paid dataset. It is a reasonable choice for narrow, well-defined lists, a poor one for open-ended enrichment.

What free cannot give you

Be realistic about the gaps:

• Scale. Caps of tens of lookups a month do not support lead routing at volume.
• Support and stability. Free tiers come with limited service commitments.
• Coverage. Small free tiers often cover less data than paid ones.
• Terms. Read them. Usage rules on free plans can restrict commercial use.

For budget planning beyond free, see the pricing breakdown, and for a shortlist method see how to choose a company enrichment API.

A sensible zero-budget plan

1. Use a free lookup tool to sanity-check ten companies you know well.
2. Prepare a 200-domain sample and a script.
3. Claim a trial credit and run two or three providers in the same week.
4. Compare found rate, correctness and cost per correct record.
5. Decide, then budget the small paid amount that your volume really needs.

For many teams the paid amount is smaller than expected, particularly with pay-per-found billing. If you are a student or a hobbyist, free tiers may be all you ever need. If you are shipping a product, treat free as the on-ramp and move to a paid, documented plan before launch. The home page maps the other jobs Clearbit used to do if you need more than enrichment.

Comparing free options on the same job

To keep the evaluation honest, pick one job and test every free option on it. If the job is “find company size and industry for 200 domains”, only some of the tools in the table apply: the company lookup from BusinessMCP does, Hunter’s free credits are aimed at email finding, and IPinfo Lite gives country-level IP data. Comparing them across different jobs produces nothing useful.

For the job of company attributes by domain, the Clearbit API alternative comparison lays out what BusinessMCP’s lookup returns, its $5 one-time credit and its stated limits. Combine that with a hand check of thirty results and you will know within an hour whether a free test is enough to proceed.

When to stop using free

Move to a paid plan when any of these is true: your usage regularly hits the cap, the data feeds a revenue-affecting decision, you need a support channel, or you cannot afford for the service to change terms without notice. Paid does not have to mean expensive. With pay-per-found pricing, a small paid balance can be cheaper than the engineering hours you spend working around a free tier’s limits.