Crustdata

Crustdata is a YC-backed (F24) B2B data provider that positions itself not as a prospecting UI but as a real-time API layer feeding people and company intelligence into whatever the customer is building. Its core differentiator is "live indexing": rather than only serving a cached, batch-refreshed database the way People Data Labs does, which Crustdata also provides, Crustdata claims it crawls the web in real time as you apply search filters, and pushes change notifications (job changes, funding, promotions) via its Watcher API and webhooks. The product surface spans Company, Person, Job, Web, and Social Post endpoints, plus bulk flat-file datasets (CSV/JSON) refreshed monthly/quarterly. Headline coverage claims are roughly 1B people and 60M companies, with 250M+ profiles in the bulk datasets and 250+ company / 90+ people datapoints.

The pricing model is credit-based: each endpoint consumes a fraction of a credit (search results are ~0.03 credits each; person enrich runs 1–7 credits; company enrich 2 credits; identify and autocomplete are free). There is a permanent free tier (commonly cited as 100 credits/month, no card), but named paid plan prices are NOT published on the pricing page, the site routes to "credit-based usage tiers" and an enterprise contact-sales motion, with the heavier live/professional-network endpoints gated to enterprise. Third-party estimates put real usage in the low-hundreds-to-thousands of dollars per month, but these are not vendor-confirmed.

The honest picture: developers consistently praise the API as clean, fast, well-documented, and easy to integrate, and the real-time freshness is the most-cited strength versus PDL. It is a strong fit for engineering teams building GTM, recruiting, or investment-signal tooling; a poor fit for non-technical buyers who want a self-serve search UI or fully transparent list pricing.