Pearch
Pearch.ai · Ranked #9 of 12 in AI Candidate Sourcing Tools
Natural-language people search with a REST API and an MIT-licensed remote MCP server; self-serve credit packs from $300 with per-feature credit costs published, but no free trial without sales, no SDKs and no status page found.
HR-tech builders and agents that need natural-language candidate search with optional email/phone enrichment, billed in credits
Overview
Pearch sells a candidate-sourcing API that takes a natural-language query and returns ranked profiles. A REST API (api.pearch.ai v2 search) is billed in credits, and an official MIT-licensed MCP server (remote at mcp.pearch.ai with OAuth or Bearer API key) exposes search_people, search_company_leads, get_profile and a free get_user_info. A published search tier model has fast, pro and superfast modes; credit costs are 1 credit (fast), 5 (pro), 1 (insights), 2 (real-time profile) and 6 each for email or phone enrichment.
Public pricing is unusually transparent: Standard $600 for 10,000 credits, Startup $1,500 for 40,000, Growth $3,000 for 125,000 and a first-purchase $300 offer, all bought self-serve on the dashboard with auto-recharge on by default. There is no standard free trial; trials for early startups, custom packs and annual contracts go through a sales call. The minimum spend ($300) makes experimentation costlier than usage-based rivals.
Evidence is thin elsewhere. docs.pearch.ai could not be retrieved in this review and /docs on the main site returned 404, so documentation is scored mainly from the MCP README and third-party gateway pages (which disagree on per-request price, $0.266-$0.27). No status page, SLA or incident history was found. No G2, Trustpilot or Product Hunt reviews were found; the only comparative evidence is an April 2025 arXiv preprint authored by the vendor, so it is not treated as independent.
How this score is derived
The APIbenchmarks Index is a weighted sum of four dimensions, each scored on an absolute 0–100 reference scale. See the methodology for every mapping.
| Dimension | Score | Weight | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documentation & DXThe MCP README documents four tools, install commands, auth modes and search types, and the site links to API docs, but docs.pearch.ai could not be fetched and third-party gateway pages disagree on pricing; scored conservatively on thin evidence. | 66 | 30% | 19.8 |
| ReliabilityNo status page, SLA or incident history was found; the MCP server exposes /health endpoints only for self-hosting. Scored low because nothing is verifiable, not because failures were observed. | 55 | 25% | 13.8 |
| Ecosystem & SDKsREST API plus an official MIT remote MCP server with OAuth and API-key auth and local stdio options; no official SDKs found and no listed ATS integrations. | 62 | 25% | 15.5 |
| AccessibilitySelf-serve credit packs with published per-feature credit costs, but a $300 minimum, no standard free trial (trials need a sales call), and inconsistent FAQ vs pricing-page terms on pack sizes and credit validity. | 68 | 20% | 13.6 |
| APIbenchmarks Index (ABI) | 62.6 | ||
Table 1. Derivation of the ABI for Pearch. Contribution = score × weight; the index is their sum.
Pearch vs the AI Candidate Sourcing Tools field
APIbenchmarks Index · higher is better
Build quality vs accessibility
Pearch (dark dot) among AI Candidate Sourcing Tools APIs
At a glance
- Vendor
- Pearch.ai
- Pricing model
- Prepaid credit packs; per-search and per-enrichment credits
- Free tier
- No
- Official SDKs
- 3 languages
Pricing
| First purchase offer | $300 | 10,000 credits, 1 month validity; first purchase only. |
| Standard | $600 | 10,000 credits, 3 months. |
| Startup | $1,500 | 40,000 credits, 3 months. |
| Growth | $3,000 | 125,000 credits, 6 months. |
| Enterprise / annual | Custom | Via sales call. |
Key features
- •Natural-language people search
- •Fast, pro and superfast search modes
- •Candidate insights and scoring
- •Real-time profiles
- •Email and phone enrichment
- •Company-lead search
- •Remote and local MCP server
Official SDKs
Strengths & trade-offs
- +Official remote MCP server (MIT) with OAuth or API key
- +Published credit packs and per-feature credit costs
- +Real-time profile and contact enrichment options
- +get_user_info reports remaining credits for free
- +Self-serve purchase of the four listed packs
- –No free trial without contacting sales
- –$300 minimum purchase
- –docs.pearch.ai not retrievable and third-party prices disagree
- –No SDKs, status page or SLA found
- –No independent review corpus found
- –FAQ and pricing page disagree on pack sizes and expiry
What developers say
No independent reviews found
No G2, Trustpilot or Product Hunt reviews were found; the only comparative study was written by the vendor.
“An April 2025 preprint by the vendor's own authors reports Pearch scoring highest against LinkedIn Recruiter, Juicebox and Exa (paraphrased; vendor-authored).”
Key figures
| Fast search cost | 1 credit | Pearch pricing ↗ |
| Email or phone enrichment | 6 credits each | Pearch pricing ↗ |
| Largest pack | $3,000 for 125,000 credits | Pearch pricing ↗ |
| Gateway-listed search price | $0.266-$0.27 per request (third party) | Lava gateway ↗ |
Compare Pearch head to head
Sources
- https://pearch.ai/pricing
- https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Pearch-ai/mcp_pearch@main/README.md
- https://www.lava.so/docs/gateway/providers/pearch
- https://arxiv.org/html/2504.02463v1
- https://ai.g2.com/marketplace/tools/mcp-pearch
Figures last verified 2026-10-22. Spotted an error? corrections@apibenchmarks.com