Which B2B Data Tools Have a Real Free Tier? Three of Fifteen

Here's the trap. You want to test three data tools before paying, all three advertise a free tier, so you sign up. You build a list of a hundred contacts in the first one, go to download it, and find that export is the thing the free tier does not include.

Three of fifteen have a free allowance that renews and lets you export. Hunter at 50 credits a month, Prospeo at 100, and Persana at 50. Everything else in the data category is a one-time grant, a trial, or a plan you cannot get data out of.

The word free is doing three different jobs on these pages, rather like a shop where some things are free samples, some are free with purchase, and some are free to look at through the window.

So this page sorts them by which kind of free they are, applies the export test, works out what the allowances actually buy, and names the one vendor that says plainly it has no free tier at all.

What are the three kinds of free?

A one-time grant is a trial with the clock removed. It is genuinely useful for testing and useless for ongoing work, and four vendors here present it under the same heading as a recurring allowance.

Can you actually export anything?

This is the test that matters and it removes half the recurring tiers.

• Snov.io has a genuinely renewable free plan, with credits refreshing every 30 days and no time limit, and it states that export is available on "all plans except Trial". The renewable plan is the Trial. You can find contacts and you cannot take them anywhere.
• BuiltWith is free forever for individual site lookups, one domain at a time, with no export. Useful for answering a question about one company, not for building a list.
• Store Leads offers a free account described as a limited preview, and export is a Pro feature. Its $75 tier cannot export either. The cheapest plan that produces a list is $250 a month.

None of that is hidden exactly, but none of it is on the plan card either. In Store Leads' case the restriction appears in the comparison table further down the page and not on the tier itself.

How far do fifty free credits actually go?

Not fifty contacts, if you need phone numbers. The mobile multiplier applies to free credits exactly as it does to paid ones.

• 50 credits at BetterContact, FullEnrich or Persana buys 50 email addresses, or 5 mobile numbers. A phone number costs ten credits at all three.
• 100 credits at Clearout buys 100 verifications, or about 25 email finds, because its Finder charges four credits for a non-role address.
• 50 credits at Hunter buys 50 finds or 100 verifications, since verification costs half a credit.

If you are testing whether a tool can find mobile numbers for your ICP, a fifty-credit grant gives you a sample of five. That is not enough to judge a match rate, and it is worth knowing before you draw a conclusion from it. We set out the full multiplier comparison separately.

Which vendor is most honest about this?

LeadMagic, which has no free tier and says so in plain words: it no longer offers a free-credits programme, and new accounts choose a paid plan at signup.

What it offers instead is a full refund of the first subscription payment within fourteen days, one per organisation, explicitly excluding annual plans. For a buyer wanting to test properly, that is more useful than three of the free tiers above, because it comes with the whole product and unrestricted export.

What about Apollo's free tier?

It exists, and the widely repeated claim that it permits very large exports cannot be settled from Apollo's own pages. Unlimited-sounding language sits alongside a record selection limit, which Apollo's help centre illustrates itself: saving ten thousand leads would mean selecting twenty-five at a time, two thousand times.

We are not going to resolve that, because Apollo has not. Both things are on its site and only one of them describes the experience of using it.

A correction to our own records

This directory records a free tier on 109 of its 264 tools, using a single true-or-false field. Having read fifteen of them properly, that field is carrying all six of the meanings in the table above, which makes it less useful than it looks.

One record is outright wrong. We have Persana marked as having no free tier, and it has a real recurring one at 50 credits a month with CSV export listed. Three others, Dropcontact, BetterContact and FullEnrich, are marked as having free tiers when they grant credits once at signup.

We would rather say that here than quietly adjust the records and let the old counts stand. The field needs a definition before the numbers mean anything, and the same problem is probably sitting in every directory that publishes a free-tier column.

So which should you actually test with?

• To test email finding, start with Prospeo at 100 credits a month. It is the largest recurring allowance that exports, and 100 records is enough to see a match rate.
• To test verification, use Clearout's 100 signup credits, and note it also publishes which results it charges for, which we cover in the verifier comparison.
• To test phone coverage, do not use a free tier. Fifty credits is five numbers at most vendors. Buy the cheapest month of something with a 5x multiplier instead, or use LeadMagic's fourteen-day refund.
• Before signing up anywhere, check the export line on the comparison table rather than the plan card. That is where the restriction lives at two of the three tools that have one.

The answer to the question in the title is three: Hunter, Prospeo and Persana. The other twelve offer something, and in most cases it is worth having, but it is a sample rather than a tier and the pricing pages do not draw that line for you. If you are testing rather than browsing, note that no free tier here is large enough to run a 200-record test.