The OpenCorporates API starts at £2,250 a year and has no email addresses

Search for opencorporates api and every paid slot on the page belongs to a contact-data company. Apollo, CompanyData.com and People Data Labs are all bidding on a query about a public registry, which tells you what people go looking for next.

Company registry data is real, it is queryable, and for some jobs it is the correct starting point. It is also priced, licensed and structured in ways that decide quite quickly whether it can be the basis of a prospect list. Here is what it costs, what it returns, and where it runs out.

What the API costs

From OpenCorporates' own pricing page, read 6 September 2026.

The entry tier is £2,250 a year for 500 calls a month. One call is one query, matched or not, so a search that returns nothing still spends one.

Google's AI Overview on this query prints the same tiers as monthly figures, £225, £660 and £1,200 a month. OpenCorporates states them as annual commitments, and that is the number that appears on a purchase order.

Without a plan, the documented default is smaller than most people expect: "By default you're allowed up to 200 requests per month, and 50 requests per day, but usage limits depend on your account type and plan."

Who gets it free

The door query includes the word free, so this is worth being exact about. OpenCorporates' pricing page states who qualifies:

"We support investigative journalists, NGOs, universities and anti-crime-and-corruption research groups"

Four categories, enumerated rather than illustrated. Sales, marketing and commercial research appear in none of them, and the page names no other basis for free access. If you are building a prospect list, the free tier is not addressed to you, and the price above is the price.

What comes back

The company object is detailed and genuinely useful for what it is. Name, company number, jurisdiction, company type, current status, incorporation and dissolution dates, registered address, previous and alternative names, industry codes, identifiers, the registry URL, branch relationships, controlling entity and ultimate beneficial owners, filings, and the officers list.

The officer object is shorter: name, id, an OpenCorporates URL, position, uid, start date, end date, address, and date of birth.

Read those two lists again for what is absent. There is no email field. There is no phone field. There is no field that asserts a person currently works anywhere. An officer's end date tells you a role finished, and nothing in the schema tells you what the person does now or how to reach them.

That is not an oversight. A registry records filings made to a state. Contact details are not filed.

How fast it goes out of date

This is the number that decides whether registry data can carry outreach, and the answer differs by jurisdiction more sharply than anything else here.

In the UK, a change to a company's directors must be notified to Companies House quickly. Section 167G of the Companies Act 2006, headed "Duty to notify registrar of change in directors" and in force since 18 November 2025, requires notice when a person becomes or ceases to be a director, and sets the deadline: "A notice under this section must be given within the period of 14 days beginning with the day on which the person becomes or ceases to be a director."

In Delaware, the disclosure point is the annual franchise tax report, due on or before 1 March each year, and section 502 of title 8 requires it to state the names and addresses of all directors as of the filing date plus the name and address of the one officer who signs it. There is no statutory requirement found to file an interim update when someone leaves.

California is the same shape with different dates. Section 1502 of the Corporations Code requires a statement within 90 days of the original articles and then annually during a filing window tied to the incorporation month, with no day-count deadline after a change itself.

So a director change in London reaches the public record within a fortnight, and the equivalent change in Wilmington or Sacramento may not surface for up to a year. A UK registry record and a US one look identical in a spreadsheet and carry completely different freshness. That gap compounds with the ordinary decay of any contact record, which we measured separately in what list decay actually costs you.

Two more things narrow the officer picture. Companies House removed the occupation field from its API on 23 October 2025, so job description is no longer available there. And OpenCorporates itself, writing in May 2025, says of the United States that "access to US company data is poor (average score only 31/100)" and that "Delaware does not require corporations to file officer information with the state, so such details are unavailable in Delaware's public registry."

The licence, and what share-alike asks of you

OpenCorporates publishes its database under the Open Database Licence, and the terms are specific enough that they change the design of anything built on top.

On attribution:

"Use of any data must be accompanied by a hyperlink reading 'from OpenCorporates' and linking to either the OpenCorporates homepage or the page referring to the information in question."

There is a size rule attached to it, which is unusual enough to quote:

"The attribution must be large and clear enough to be clearly associated with the usage, and must in all cases be no smaller than 70% of the largest font relating to the information or 7px, whichever is the larger."

And on share-alike:

"The ODbL also requires you to share any improvements you make to our databases under the ODbL as well. For example, if you combine the information with your own data, the resultant information must be published under the Attribution Share-Alike ODbL."

Read that last clause against what a prospecting workflow actually does. Taking registry records, joining your own research to them and holding the result in a private database is the combination the clause describes. Whether any paid tier alters this obligation is not stated on the pricing page, and no source was found that settles it, so anyone planning to build on this data commercially should get the answer from OpenCorporates in writing before the build rather than after.

The other three registries

Companies House is the strongest of the four for this purpose, and the reason is the resignation date. It is the only one of these that routinely tells you a named person has left, within a fortnight of them leaving. Its licensing position is also permissive: the service owner for Get Company Information states on the official developer forum that information on the public register is made available under section 47 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and Schedule 1 of the Database Regulations, and that "Companies House imposes no rules or requirements on how the information on the public register is used." GLEIF publishes its data under CC0, which is as unrestricted as a licence gets, and returns no person data at all.

Below the national level it fragments fast. New York publishes its active corporations dataset on an open-data platform that accepts unauthenticated API queries. Texas charges a dollar per search through SOSDirect and offers no API. Delaware offers no API, and its entity search page states that use of automated tools in any form may result in suspension of access.

Where the registry stops

You can establish, for free or nearly free, that a company exists, when it was incorporated, where it is registered, what it calls itself now and what it used to call itself, who signs its filings and who owns it.

You cannot establish from any of these sources who runs the function you sell to, whether that person is still there this month, what their email address is, or whether anyone at that company is in a position to buy. Every one of those is a different data problem, solved by a different kind of source, which is why the ads on this query are what they are.

The clearest published statement of that boundary comes from SMARTe, which sells prospecting data and therefore has an interest in making it: "OpenCorporates was never built for you. It confirms a company is real. It will never hand you the email or mobile number of the VP you want to reach." No source without a product to sell was found saying the same thing, which is itself worth knowing when you read anything comparing registries to sales tools.

The practical version, then. Use a registry for what it is authoritative about, which is the legal entity: does this company exist, under what name, in what jurisdiction, since when, and who is on the filing. Then treat the person layer as a separate purchase with its own accuracy question, the one we went through in what vendor accuracy claims actually measure, and its own cost per row, the shape of which we broke down in Apollo credits, explained.

If the list of companies is the part you already have, the missing half is the people at them and whether they are still there. That is also the case when your starting point is an export you own rather than a registry, which we walked through in how to export your LinkedIn connections.

Sources in this article were read on 6 September 2026: OpenCorporates' pricing page, API reference and terms of use, and its blog post of 28 May 2025 on US company data; the UK Companies House developer specification and its official developer forum; section 167G of the Companies Act 2006 and sections 502 of Delaware title 8 and 1502 of the California Corporations Code, via published statute; the SEC's EDGAR API documentation; and GLEIF's LEI data terms of use. Where a registry publishes no figure, this article says so rather than supplying one.