RichAPI Review: An API-First Approach to B2B Data Enrichment
Upon visiting richapi.ai, I was struck by how little the landing page looks like a typical data-enrichment website. There is no dashboard screenshot tour, no "book a demo" wall. Instead, the hero states the pitch in one line: one API key, 65+ go-to-market data endpoints, 40+ licensed providers underneath, and a single credit pool. RichAPI is a B2B data enrichment API and MCP server that gives developers and GTM engineers live contact, company, social, and intent-signal data without forcing them into another platform. The site even showcases a prompt example, asking Claude to find 20 VPs of Marketing at 50-200 person SaaS companies who posted about pipeline this week and return verified emails, which tells you immediately who this is built for.
What RichAPI Does and the Problem It Solves
Most enrichment vendors sit on top of the same handful of licensed data providers, then bill you through a seat, a bundle, or a platform subscription that obscures what any single lookup cost. That model breaks down when your enrichment needs to happen inside code, an agent, or a CRM automation rather than inside the vendor's UI. RichAPI strips the UI away and sells the routing layer directly.
Concretely, the tool covers four data types: contact data (email finder, email verifier, phone finder, people search, people enrichment), company and firmographic enrichment, LinkedIn and social profile data, and signals. Behind those endpoints is a waterfall routing engine that tries licensed providers in sequence and returns the first live, verified result. The verification claim is specific: a record counts as verified only when the waterfall returns a positive deliverability or reachable signal. Every waterfall call also returns an execution log showing which providers were tried, which one answered, and what was billed, which is a genuinely unusual level of transparency for this category.
Delivery is deliberately unopinionated. You can call RichAPI over REST, or connect it as an MCP server to Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf. The company also lists Clay, HubSpot, Zapier, and n8n as integration surfaces. Single calls typically resolve in a few seconds, with a bulk endpoint and async webhooks for large jobs.
Testing RichAPI: Onboarding, MCP Setup, and the Free Tier
When testing the free tier, the friction is minimal by design. Sign-up grants 100 credits with no credit card required, which is enough to run a real enrichment pass rather than a toy query. The dashboard shows a credit balance rather than a seat list or a plan tier, reinforcing that everything bills from one pool regardless of which endpoint you hit.
The MCP route is the most interesting workflow I explored. Rather than writing a script, you add RichAPI as an MCP server and let an assistant orchestrate the calls. In practice that means an agent can chain a people search, a company filter, and an email finder in a single conversational turn, then hand back verified addresses. For anyone already living in Claude or a code editor with an agent attached, this removes the export-and-import step that plagues traditional enrichment platforms. The REST path is more conventional: authenticated endpoints, fixed credit costs documented per endpoint, and webhook callbacks for async jobs.
One caveat I noticed is that because everything is credit-metered per endpoint, it helps to know which endpoint you actually need before you start spending. The documentation does list fixed credit costs per endpoint, and the free tier is forgiving enough to experiment, but the tool rewards users who already understand waterfall enrichment rather than beginners who want a guided setup wizard.
RichAPI Pricing: Credits Instead of Seats
The pricing philosophy is stated plainly: fixed credit pricing per endpoint, no seats, no minimums, and no charge for email or phone lookups that return nothing. That last point matters. Misses are a real cost centre in waterfall enrichment, and shifting that risk to the vendor is a meaningful commercial difference rather than a marketing line. The company also admits it marks up underlying providers, but argues the execution log makes that markup auditable. Exact per-credit prices and bundle sizes were not visible in the material I reviewed, so Pricing is not publicly listed on the website in the detail needed for a cost-per-record calculation. Prospective buyers should check the pricing page directly before modelling spend.
How RichAPI Compares to Clay, Apollo, and Clearbit-Style Tools
Clay is the obvious comparison point, and RichAPI's own copy acknowledges it: the API is pitched as something you plug into Clay rather than replace it. Where Clay is a workspace with its own credits, waterfall builder, and UI, RichAPI is infrastructure, with no interface to learn, no seat to buy, and no platform to migrate to. Apollo is the other reference, and the contrast is sharper. Apollo bundles a database, sequencing, and CRM features, while RichAPI sells only the data-routing layer. If you need a sales engagement suite, RichAPI is the wrong tool. If you already have a stack and just want verified records flowing into it, the API-first model is more attractive.
For backing and scale indicators, the site publishes no funding or customer-count figures, so I will not speculate. What is visible is a growing documentation library covering email verification references, lead generation API guides, and sales data enrichment playbooks, which suggests a company investing in developer education rather than outbound sales.
Strengths, Limitations, and Who Should Use RichAPI
The strengths are concrete. The execution log is a real differentiator in a category built on opacity. Free misses on email and phone remove a common budget leak. MCP support means the tool works inside the AI assistants teams already pay for, and the absence of seats or contracts makes it easy to trial without procurement.
The limitations are equally real. RichAPI has no UI for browsing or cleaning data, so it assumes you have somewhere to put the results. Waterfall latency means each call takes seconds, which matters at volume. And because the provider list is described as licensed without full disclosure, you are trusting the router's ordering rather than choosing providers yourself.
RichAPI is best suited to GTM engineers, rev-ops teams, and AI agent builders who want verified B2B contact and company data piped into code, a CRM, or an MCP-compatible assistant. Teams that want a full enrichment workspace with a visual interface, or a combined database-and-sequencing platform, should look at Clay or Apollo instead.
Visit RichAPI at https://richapi.ai to explore it yourself.
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