Contact database · comparison
Hunter.io alternative
Hunter finds the address. We check it is still alive.
What Hunter.io is
Email finder and verifier. Give it a name and a domain and it returns a likely address with a confidence score, drawn from crawled public sources.
Finding addresses from a name. Their crawl is large and their pattern data is genuinely good, which is exactly the step that fails without a corpus.
Pick Hunter.io when: You have names and need addresses. Our discovery only infers a pattern when the domain already publishes one, so on a domain that publishes nothing, Hunter will beat us.
You want to know whether an address accepts mail right now, and you would rather not upload the list to find out.
Side by side
| Hunter.io | Verdict | |
|---|---|---|
| Finding by name | Large crawled corpus | Pattern inference, needs published evidence |
| Verification | Confidence score | The server's own reply, quoted |
| Free tier | 25 searches a month | Unlimited, self-hosted |
| Your list | Uploaded | Stays local |
Hunter is free for 25 searches a month, then paid by volume. Free and MIT, or $59/mo hosted.
The honest summary
Verdict has no contact database and does not send campaigns. It opens an SMTP connection to the receiving server, asks whether the mailbox exists, and reports what the server said. When the server refuses to answer, or the domain accepts every address, it says so instead of guessing. That is the whole product, it is MIT licensed, and it runs on your own machine so the list never goes anywhere.
Try it on a real list
Paste up to 500 addresses. Free, no signup, nothing stored. The fairest test is your last campaign's bounce list, since you already know which ones failed.