Find emails by name: what each lookup costs

You have a name and a company. You need the work address. Most tools that find emails by name work the same way underneath: it takes the name and the company domain, checks what it knows about that domain, and returns an address with a confidence signal, or nothing.

What differs is the price of a lookup, and what happens to your money when the answer is nothing. This post lays out both for the email finders in one catalog, read on 2026-10-11.

Disclosure: I founded looot, and looot sells access to every provider named here. The prices are public and you can re-read them without an account.

What do you need to find emails by name?

Two inputs: the person's full name and the company's domain. A company name works with most finders, but a domain gives a cleaner match, because two companies can share a name and never share a domain.

A LinkedIn profile address is a third option. Some endpoints take it in place of the name and domain, and some take it only. Check the input before you compare prices, because an endpoint that needs a profile address is no use when all you have is a spreadsheet of names.

Which providers find emails by name and domain?

At least ten providers in the catalog take a name plus a company or domain. The table shows the ten whose description spells out the input, with what each one asks for and what its catalog description says about a lookup that finds nothing.

Five of the ten say or imply that a miss costs nothing. Two say a miss costs the same as a hit. Three say nothing about misses, and I would test those on a small batch before trusting an estimate.

What does it cost to find an email by name?

Here is every provider that prices the email finding job per call, at its cheapest endpoint, on the day I read the catalog. The list includes endpoints that take a LinkedIn profile, so read the endpoint name next to the price.

Among the ten finders in the table above, the dearest per-call price is about five times the cheapest. That is a far narrower gap than the full table suggests, because the two ends of the full table are different products: one takes a profile address, the other unlocks an address for a person you have already identified. One more provider takes a name and a domain on an endpoint priced far above all ten, so compare endpoints, not provider names.

The frozen table goes stale. The block below reads the catalog when this page loads.

Why is the price per lookup not the price per email?

Because not every lookup finds an address, and providers split on who pays for the miss.

Take two finders. The first bills only when it finds an address. The second bills every call. If both find six addresses out of ten names, the first costs six lookups for six emails. The second costs ten lookups for six emails, so each found email costs the unit price divided by 0.6.

That changes the ranking. A finder with a higher unit price and free misses can cost less per found email than a cheaper one that bills every call. The hit rate decides it, and hit rates depend on your list. Small companies, new hires and people with no public footprint are harder for everyone.

The catalog publishes no measured hit rate for these endpoints, so I quote none. Measure your own on 50 rows before you run 5,000.

How do you know the address is real?

Read the status that comes back with it. A finder does not just return an address. The catalog descriptions list a confidence score, a verification status, a catch-all flag or a certainty level, depending on the provider.

Three statuses matter in practice:

• Valid or deliverable. The mail server accepted the address.
• Catch-all. The domain accepts every address, so the check proves nothing. Treat it as unconfirmed.
• Not found or unknown. Nothing to send to.

For a list you plan to email, run a separate verification on what the finder returned. The cheapest verification is listed at a fraction of the cheapest finder's price, and it catches addresses that were right last year. If your agent hands you an address with no status at all, it probably composed it. I covered that failure in why an agent guesses emails.

Should you try more than one provider?

Yes, in order, and only for the rows that came back empty. That is a waterfall, and it is the cheapest way to raise coverage.

1. Start with the cheapest finder that takes your input and does not bill a miss.
2. Send only the empty rows to the next provider.
3. Stop when a row has a verified address.
4. Keep a count of which provider answered each row.

The count matters. After a few hundred rows you will know which provider finds your kind of contact, and you can reorder the waterfall around it. The longer explanation is in waterfall enrichment explained.

Try it: find business email addresses with your agent

If you are replacing a dedicated email finder, the Hunter alternatives page lists which of its jobs the catalog covers. For a worked list build, see CEO emails for fintechs.

What this cannot do

• It cannot find an address that no provider has.
• It cannot tell you whether you may email the person. Cold email rules differ by country, and that check is yours.
• It gives you no hit rate. I ran no paid lookup for this post. The prices are list prices and the billing rules come from each endpoint's catalog description.

Last checked 2026-10-11 against the looot public catalog. Written by Walid Boulanouar, who founded looot. The wider comparison across five jobs is in what the same data costs across providers.