What the Crunchbase API costs, and what it will not tell you

You want to reach companies that just raised, the Crunchbase API looks like the way to do it, and the second result on Google tells you it costs $49 a month.

It does not. $49 a month is Crunchbase Pro, billed annually, which is a seat licence for one person to use the website. The buy page carries it as a strikethrough on $79, with $99 if you pay monthly. No Crunchbase page we read publishes a price for the API, including the one page that exists to sell you things.

What Crunchbase actually publishes

Read the buy page and the ladder is short. Pro at $49 a month billed annually gives one person search across four million private companies and exports capped at 2,000 rows a month. Business starts at $199 a month billed annually and lifts that to 5,000 rows, with predictions and CRM integrations attached. Both are seats, and the $99 that appears twice on Crunchbase's pages is two different things: Pro's monthly price, and the price of a 500-contact credit pack on Business.

The API sits in a fourth box on the same page under a different heading, with no number in it and a button that says Talk With Our Team. Crunchbase's support documentation says the same thing in more words: API pricing is customised and depends on the use case, the volume and the type of data being licensed. Crunchbase also now offers an MCP path, described as querying Crunchbase in plain English from inside Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Cursor, and priced the same way, which is to say not publicly.

So every specific API price you find in the search results was inferred by somebody. The one ranking second, $49 a month, is a seat price wearing an API label. The one ranking first is published by ZoomInfo, which sells against Crunchbase.

The free tier is gone, and the date is not published

Crunchbase's own developer documentation states that the Basic API is no longer offered, and that existing keys remain viewable but cannot be regenerated. No date appears next to that statement anywhere we could find, and a legacy page elsewhere on the same domain still invites you to provision a key and get started today.

The demand has not caught up. The autocomplete around this query is still full of people looking for the free tier, the free key and the free alternative.

Worth knowing what they are looking for. The Basic API returned eighteen organization fields across three endpoints, and funding rounds were not among them. The free tier people remember never carried the data that makes Crunchbase worth querying.

What the API returns, and what it does not

This is the part that decides whether the API solves your problem, and it is easier to check than the price.

The Person endpoint's own reference documentation is the place to look. Across the entire response body for a person, the string "email" appears four times, and every one of them is contact_email, described as the general contact email for the organization. Phone is the same shape: the organization's general phone number. What you get about the person is a link to their LinkedIn page, their jobs, their degrees and the organizations they founded.

There is no work email for the person in that response. No direct phone. Nothing that tells you whether they are still in the job the record says they are in, which is the thing that decays fastest in any contact record.

Crunchbase does sell person-level contact data, including titles, job levels, departments, LinkedIn profiles, email addresses and phone numbers. It sells it as a feature of the Business seat, not the API and not Pro, metered in monthly contact credits at $29 for 100, $59 for 250 and $99 for 500, which do not accrue and expire at the end of each month. Business customers get ten of those contacts a month at no charge. No Crunchbase page we read states that those contacts are available through the API.

That is the boundary, and it is a familiar one. The funding signal comes down the pipe. The person you would actually email is rented by the month, in a different product, on a different meter. It is the same shape as what a company registry gives you and where it stops, with a better signal at the front and the same missing piece at the back.

Rate limits, and the thing nobody defines

Crunchbase documents a rate limit of 200 calls per minute for its API endpoints, and says the API responds with an error message when you exceed it. What it does not document anywhere is what counts as a call. A search returning a full page of results and a single entity lookup are both requests; whether they cost the same against your quota is not stated, and neither is any monthly cap.

For a founder pulling a target list once a month this is unlikely to bite. For anything that runs on a schedule, it is the first question to put to the sales team you have to talk to anyway.

What you are allowed to do with it

Crunchbase's licence terms scope use to internal research and analysis, and passing the data itself to a third party is out, as is training models on it. What the terms expressly allow is publishing analysis and aggregate statistics derived from the data, so a funding-trends post built on it is fine and a copy of the underlying records is not. The terms also require you to expunge the data within ten days of termination, on both of the access types they name, which means the list you built is not an asset you keep. The pricing terms themselves are confidential, which is a large part of why the search results for this query are full of invented numbers.

What the terms do not say, anywhere we could find, is whether using the data to contact the companies in it counts as internal research or as something else. That is the question to ask before you buy, and it is not answerable from the public pages.

What to do instead, if the answer is no

If what you need is a funding signal on a target list you already have, the API is an expensive way to get it and the seat may be enough: 2,000 export rows a month at $49 covers a lot of hand-run outbound. If you need person-level contact data at volume, this is not the product, whatever the pricing conversation concludes.

If what you need is the funding signal itself and not a database, the cheap version is the announcements: funding rounds are published, and the companies that just raised are the ones writing about it. That is a slower list to build by hand and it costs nothing, which for a founder running outbound between other jobs is usually the right trade until the list is worth a licence.

And if the reason you are here is that the free tier is gone, the honest answer is that it was never the thing you wanted. Free tiers are worth exactly the rows they deliver, and eighteen organization fields with no funding rounds was not a lead list.