BetterContact
Twenty providers in a waterfall, and no charge for a catch-all
BetterContact is a waterfall enrichment service that queries more than twenty B2B data providers in sequence for each contact until one returns a verified work email or mobile number, runs a four-layer verification pass on the result, and charges only when valid data is found; one credit buys a verified email and ten credits buy a verified mobile, with plans from 15 dollars a month and no charge at all for catch-all addresses.
Overview
BetterContact was built in Lyon in 2022 by Frederic Bonnand and Roman Hipp on the observation that no single B2B data vendor is good enough. Every provider has geographic and industry gaps, so a team buying from one of them accepts a hit rate somewhere in the fifties and calls it normal. BetterContact's answer is to buy from twenty of them at once: each contact is passed down a chain of providers until one returns something that survives verification, and you pay a single subscription rather than twenty.
The commercial design is the part that has earned it a following among cold outbound agencies, who make up the large majority of its customers. One credit is one verified email. Ten credits are one verified mobile number. Nothing is charged when the waterfall comes back empty, and, unusually, nothing is charged for a catch-all address either. Catch-alls are the grey area every vendor exploits: they are technically deliverable and practically a gamble, and most competitors bill for them. BetterContact states it is the only waterfall tool that charges for none of them.
The pricing ladder is published in full. Starter is 15 dollars for 200 credits with ten providers. Pro starts at 49 dollars for 1,000 credits and steps up through 149 at 3,000, 199 at 5,000, 399 at 10,000, 799 at 20,000, 1,199 at 30,000, and 1,999 at 50,000, adding more than twenty providers, catch-all verification, and mobile phone verification. Enterprise from 799 dollars adds a dedicated account manager, volume pricing, and the option to bring your own provider API keys, which is the escape hatch that makes the model cheap at scale.
The company is tiny, roughly four people, bootstrapped, with reported revenue around a million dollars and more than 150,000 enrichments processed daily for over a thousand companies. That combination of small team and high throughput is common in this corner of the market and is the main thing to weigh: the product is excellent and the vendor is four people, so treat it as a component you could swap rather than as infrastructure you build a company on.
Best for
Cold outbound agencies and sales teams who care more about hit rate than about unit price, who need both emails and mobile numbers from one subscription, and who want the guarantee that a catch-all or a miss costs them nothing.
Not the right fit for
- Teams that need the lowest possible cost per email; single-source vendors like Icypeas or Anymail Finder are several times cheaper per verified address and a waterfall is overkill for easy lists.
- Buyers who need to build prospect lists from scratch; BetterContact enriches identities you already have and offers no filterable people database.
- Organisations that require SOC 2, ISO 27001, SSO, or a completed security questionnaire; a four-person company has none of that.
- Anyone who wants full transparency about which provider supplied which record; the waterfall abstracts the supply chain by design and that is precisely what a strict data governance policy will object to.
- Companies that need vendor durability as a procurement criterion; this is a bootstrapped four-person team with around a million dollars of revenue.
How it works
- 1
You send contacts in from a CSV or Excel upload, from the API, from a CRM, or from a tool like Clay that calls BetterContact as a provider.
- 2
For each contact the waterfall begins. BetterContact queries its providers in sequence, using an ordering its BetterAI layer adjusts based on the contact's attributes, and stops at the first result that passes verification. Named providers in the chain include Apollo, RocketReach, ContactOut, Hunter, Datagma, People Data Labs, and Prospeo.
- 3
Each candidate result goes through a four-layer verification pass before it is accepted. If a provider returns something that fails verification, the waterfall moves on rather than handing you a guess.
- 4
Billing happens only on the accepted result: one credit for a verified work email, ten for a verified mobile. If the chain exhausts every provider without a verified result, you pay nothing. If the only answer available is a catch-all address, you also pay nothing.
- 5
Finished records are exported in one click to connected tools, written back through the API, or pulled by whatever orchestration layer called BetterContact in the first place.
Feature breakdown
26 features in 5 modulesWaterfall enrichment
The core mechanic, and the reason the hit rate beats any single vendor.- More than twenty providers in one subscription
- Apollo, RocketReach, ContactOut, Hunter, Datagma, People Data Labs, and Prospeo among others, all callable through a single contract and a single credit balance.
- Sequential fallback until a verified match
- Each contact is passed down the chain until one provider returns data that survives verification, rather than stopping at the first provider that returns anything.
- BetterAI provider ordering
- The algorithm analyses each contact's attributes to decide which providers to try first, which reduces both latency and the number of wasted upstream calls.
- Access to three billion contacts
- The combined reach of the provider set as stated by the vendor, which is the practical meaning of buying twenty databases instead of one.
- Ten providers on Starter, twenty plus on Pro
- The 15 dollar entry plan runs a shorter chain; the full provider set is a Pro feature, which is the main functional difference between the tiers.
- Bring your own API keys on Enterprise
- Enterprise customers can plug in their own provider contracts, shifting upstream data costs onto their own negotiated rates rather than paying BetterContact's blended price.
Verification and the billing guarantee
The commercial promise that distinguishes it from other waterfalls.- Charged only on valid data
- Credits are consumed when a verified result is accepted. A contact that runs the entire chain without a verified match costs nothing at all.
- No charge for catch-alls
- The vendor states it is the only waterfall tool that charges nothing whatsoever for catch-all addresses, which is the grey area most competitors quietly bill for.
- Four-layer verification
- Every candidate email and mobile number passes a multi-stage validation sequence before it is accepted and billed.
- Mobile phone verification
- Phone numbers are verified rather than passed through, which matters because an unverified number wastes a rep's time rather than merely bouncing.
- Catch-all verification on Pro
- Pro attempts to resolve catch-all domains properly rather than discarding them, so coverage improves without the billing risk.
Credit model and pricing mechanics
A published ladder with a phone exchange rate stated up front.- One credit per verified email
- The unit is a delivered, verified result rather than an attempt, which makes the advertised price close to the real cost per usable contact.
- Ten credits per verified mobile
- The phone exchange rate is published rather than negotiated, working out at about 49 cents a number on the entry Pro plan and around 40 cents at 10,000 credits.
- Capped rollover at two times the subscription
- Unused credits carry forward up to a ceiling of twice your monthly allowance, so a 5,000 credit subscriber can hold at most 10,000.
- Seven published Pro volume steps
- 1,000 credits at 49 dollars through 50,000 at 1,999, every step published and self-serve with no sales call required.
- Fifteen dollar entry point
- Starter at 15 dollars for 200 credits is one of the cheapest ways to test waterfall enrichment against your own list before committing.
Delivery, integrations, and API
Designed to sit inside someone else's workflow.- Clay integration
- Callable as a provider from inside Clay, which is how many GTM engineers consume it: one BetterContact column replaces a hand-built waterfall of individual provider columns.
- REST API with bulk import
- Contacts can be pushed in through the API and pulled back enriched, which is the standard path for teams running their own pipeline.
- CSV and Excel upload
- Direct file import for one-off list work, with results downloadable in the same shape.
- Ten plus native integrations
- Native connections into CRMs, sequencers, and no-code platforms, with one-click export to connected tools.
- CRM import
- Pull contacts directly from a CRM for enrichment rather than exporting and re-importing by hand.
Compliance and operations
European posture, modest paperwork.- GDPR, CCPA, and DSGVO stated
- The vendor states compliance with the European and Californian regimes and operates from France, so it falls directly under GDPR supervision.
- Processor position
- BetterContact processes the contacts you send and brokers the lookups rather than holding a large owned contact database, which narrows its own data footprint.
- Upstream provider chain
- The data ultimately comes from the twenty named providers, so a full provenance answer requires understanding their sourcing, not just BetterContact's.
- Scale in production
- More than 150,000 enrichments processed daily for over a thousand companies, which is a meaningful reliability signal for a four-person team.
- Agency-weighted customer base
- The vendor reports that roughly 72 percent of users are outbound agencies, which explains why the billing guarantees are written the way they are.
Use cases
4 documentedOutbound agency whose margin dies on unusable data
A client list of 8,000 contacts, a single-provider vendor returning about half of them, and a billing model that charges for catch-alls the agency cannot safely send to.
The waterfall lifts the hit rate well above what one provider returns, misses cost nothing, catch-alls cost nothing, and the Pro plan at 399 dollars for 10,000 credits makes the client recharge straightforward.
Sales team that needs emails and mobiles from one budget
Email-only sequences have stopped working, calling is the new plan, and buying phone data separately means a second vendor and a second contract.
One credit pool covers both at a published exchange rate of ten credits per verified mobile, and phone numbers are verified before billing rather than passed through unchecked.
GTM engineer simplifying a hand-built Clay waterfall
A Clay table has eight separate provider columns, each with its own credit cost and failure behaviour, and nobody can explain the cost per enriched row.
One BetterContact column replaces the chain, the cost per row becomes one credit for an email or ten for a mobile, and misses stop consuming anything.
Enterprise buyer with existing provider contracts
The company already has negotiated agreements with two large data vendors and does not want to pay a blended resale rate on top.
The Enterprise tier accepts your own provider API keys, so the waterfall orchestration is bought from BetterContact while the data is drawn against contracts you already hold.
Pricing
from $15 per month (Starter, 200 credits)Monthly subscription across a published credit ladder, with one credit charged per verified email and ten per verified mobile, nothing charged for misses or catch-alls, and rollover capped at twice the subscription.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $15 per month (200 credits) |
A short waterfall rather than the full chain, but the cheapest honest way to test the model on your own list. |
| Pro | $49 to $1,999 per month (1,000 to 50,000 credits) |
The ladder runs $49 at 1,000 credits, $149 at 3,000, $199 at 5,000, $399 at 10,000, $799 at 20,000, $1,199 at 30,000, and $1,999 at 50,000. |
| Enterprise | From $799 per month, custom |
Bring-your-own-keys is the feature that changes the economics at scale, since upstream data then bills against your own contracts. |
Billing notes
- A credit is consumed only when verified data is accepted. Contacts that exhaust the entire provider chain without a verified result cost nothing, which is the point of the model.
- Catch-all addresses are not charged at all. The vendor claims to be the only waterfall tool that charges nothing whatsoever for them, which is worth confirming in writing since catch-alls can be a large share of a European list.
- One credit is one verified email and ten credits are one verified mobile number, so a plan's usable size depends entirely on your channel mix. A 10,000 credit plan is either 10,000 emails or 1,000 mobiles.
- Credits roll over but are capped at twice your monthly subscription, so a 5,000 credit plan can hold at most 10,000. That is less generous than Icypeas, which never expires credits, and less generous than Datagma's twelve month rollover on monthly plans.
- The full Pro ladder to 50,000 credits is published and self-serve; no sales call is required until the Enterprise tier, and even that starts from a published 799 dollar floor.
- There is no per-seat charge on the published tiers, so cost scales with enrichment volume rather than with headcount.
Value assessment: At 1,000 lookups the Pro plan costs 49 dollars, about 4.9 cents per verified email, and at 10,000 it costs 399 dollars, about 4 cents each. That is roughly four times what Icypeas charges and twice what Anymail Finder charges for a single-source lookup. You are paying that premium for two things: a materially higher hit rate, because twenty providers cover gaps one cannot, and an absolute floor on waste, because misses and catch-alls are free. For an agency whose real cost is the leads it never reaches, that trade is usually correct. For an internal team working an easy, well-covered list, it is not, and a cheap single source plus a verifier will do the same job for a quarter of the money. Mobiles at ten credits, about 40 to 49 cents each, are competitive but not cheaper than Datagma.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- The waterfall genuinely beats any single provider on hit rate, because provider gaps are geographic and industry-specific rather than uniform.
- Charging nothing for misses and nothing for catch-alls is the strictest billing guarantee in this category, and catch-alls in particular are where competitors quietly make money.
- Twenty plus providers under one subscription removes the administrative cost of maintaining twenty vendor relationships and twenty credit balances.
- One credit pool covers both email and verified mobile numbers, with the ten-to-one exchange rate published rather than negotiated.
- Bring-your-own-API-keys on Enterprise lets larger buyers keep their negotiated upstream rates while still paying for the orchestration.
- Callable from inside Clay, which lets a GTM engineer replace an eight-column hand-built waterfall with a single column and a predictable unit cost.
- Fully published pricing from 15 dollars to 1,999 dollars a month with no quote gate until Enterprise, and even that has a published floor.
- More than 150,000 enrichments a day for over a thousand companies is a strong reliability signal for a team this size.
Limitations
- Several times more expensive per verified email than a good single-source vendor, which is the correct trade only when hit rate is worth more than unit price.
- The waterfall abstracts the supply chain, so you cannot easily tell which provider supplied a given record, which is a problem for anyone with a strict data provenance policy.
- Roughly four employees and around a million dollars of revenue means real continuity risk relative to the volume of production traffic customers push through it.
- No SOC 2, ISO 27001, SSO, or audit logging, so a formal security review cannot be completed.
- Rollover is capped at twice the subscription, so a team that overbuys loses the excess rather than banking it indefinitely.
- No prospecting database, so list building must happen elsewhere before BetterContact is useful.
- The published claims about opportunity uplift are marketing figures rather than measured match rates, and the vendor publishes no accuracy percentage or service level it will contract to.
- Bring-your-own-keys, the feature that fixes the unit economics at volume, is reserved for Enterprise.
Head-to-head comparisons
5 alternativesBetterContact vs FullEnrich
from $0 (Free, 50 starter credits), then $55 per month (Pro, 1,000 credits)The two are near-twins: both waterfall across twenty-plus sources, both charge one credit per verified email and ten per verified mobile, and both promise you pay nothing for data they cannot verify. FullEnrich adds an MCP server on all tiers, personal email lookups at three credits, and three to twelve month rollover; BetterContact counters with a 15 dollar entry point, an explicit no-charge-for-catch-alls promise, and a fully published ladder to 50,000 credits. Take FullEnrich if you want the deeper product and AI-assistant access; take BetterContact if the catch-all billing rule and the cheaper entry matter more.
Full BetterContact vs FullEnrich comparisonBetterContact vs Datagma
from $0 (Free), then $49 per month (Regular)Datagma is one of the providers inside BetterContact's own waterfall, so this is a question of buying the source or the orchestration. Datagma is cheaper per mobile at thirty credits and includes ten seats; BetterContact will find numbers Datagma alone misses, and charges nothing when it fails. Small teams optimising the phone line item take Datagma; teams whose problem is coverage take BetterContact and accept the markup.
Full BetterContact vs Datagma comparisonBetterContact vs Enrich
from $49 per month (Growth Pack, 100,000 credits)Enrich is API-first and radically cheaper on paper, charging ten credits per email against a 100,000 credit pool for 49 dollars. BetterContact costs several times more per record but runs a longer provider chain, verifies in four layers, and refuses to bill for catch-alls or misses. Developers optimising cost per call should price Enrich first; agencies whose reputation depends on bounce rates should pay BetterContact's premium.
Full BetterContact vs Enrich comparisonBetterContact vs Clay
from Free plan; paid from $149/moThese are complements more often than competitors: BetterContact is callable as a single Clay column and frequently replaces a hand-built chain of provider columns inside it. Clay is the right purchase when you need AI research, scoring, conditional logic, and workflow orchestration around the data. BetterContact is the right purchase when the only thing you need is the highest verified hit rate per contact at a predictable unit cost. Many teams pay for both and are right to.
Full BetterContact vs Clay comparisonBetterContact vs Prospeo
from $0 (Free, 100 credits/mo); paid from $37/mo per user billed yearlyProspeo is a single source with strong LinkedIn and Sales Navigator extraction and its own mobile credit type, at a lower price per record than a waterfall. BetterContact calls Prospeo among its twenty providers, so it can only match or beat Prospeo's coverage, at a markup. If your lists are well covered and price-sensitive, Prospeo directly; if coverage is the bottleneck, BetterContact.
Full BetterContact vs Prospeo comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- Fifteen minutes for a CSV run or a Clay column. An hour or two to wire the API into a pipeline. There is no waterfall to configure, which is the entire point: provider ordering is handled for you.
- Learning curve
- Low. The only modelling that matters is the ten-to-one phone exchange rate, because a team that starts pulling mobiles will burn a credit allowance ten times faster than it expects.
- Onboarding
- Self-serve on Starter and every Pro step through 50,000 credits. Enterprise adds a dedicated account manager and the bring-your-own-keys configuration. Support is chat on Starter and premium on Pro.
- Migration notes
- Nothing to migrate in beyond a CSV or an API connection. On the way out, enriched records are yours and export cleanly. The genuine consideration is that a waterfall's coverage is hard to replicate with a single vendor, so a team that has built forecasts on BetterContact's hit rate should test its replacement on the same list before switching, not after.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web applicationCSV and Excel uploadREST APIClay integrationCRM import
- API
- REST API for pushing contacts in and pulling enriched records back, with bulk import supported. Per-second and per-minute rate limits are not prominently published, so confirm expected throughput with support before building a high-volume pipeline. API access is available on the paid tiers rather than sold as a separate developer plan.
- Compliance
- GDPRCCPAEU DSGVOFrench establishment under CNIL supervision
- Data residency
- Operated from France; no customer-selectable region is advertised.
- SSO
- Not advertised.
- Security notes
- BetterContact brokers lookups across more than twenty upstream providers rather than holding a large owned contact database, which narrows its own footprint but means a complete provenance answer depends on the sourcing practices of the providers in the chain. No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification is published.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Chat support on StarterPremium support on ProDedicated account manager on Enterprise
- Documentation
- Product documentation and an API reference, plus a substantial blog on waterfall enrichment that doubles as the vendor's category education.
- Community
- No official forum; heavily present in outbound agency and GTM engineering communities, which make up most of the customer base.
Company
- Founded
- 2022
- Headquarters
- Lyon, France
- Ownership
- Bootstrapped and independent
- Founders
- Frederic Bonnand, Roman Hipp
- Employees
- About 4 (2026)
- Funding
- No outside funding raised. Third-party trackers reported revenue of roughly one million dollars in 2024 and a valuation around three million dollars set during a 2025 acquisition offer round.
Timeline
- 2022Founded in Lyon by Frederic Bonnand and Roman Hipp on the premise that no single B2B data provider has an acceptable hit rate on its own.
- 2023Establishes the pay-only-for-valid-data model and the ten-credits-per-mobile exchange rate that still define the pricing.
- 2024Grows to more than twenty upstream providers and becomes callable from inside Clay, reaching roughly one million dollars of reported revenue on a tiny team.
- 2025Adds four-layer verification and mobile phone verification, and reports processing over 150,000 enrichments daily for more than a thousand companies; a valuation of around three million dollars is set during an acquisition offer round.
- 2026Publishes the full Pro ladder to 50,000 credits self-serve and offers bring-your-own provider API keys on Enterprise.
Integrations
- Clay (as a callable provider)
- HubSpot
- Pipedrive
- Instantly and Smartlead
- Lemlist
- Zapier and Make
- CSV and Excel import and export
- CRM import and one-click export
- REST API with bulk enrichment
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is BetterContact?
BetterContact is a waterfall enrichment service. For each contact it queries more than twenty B2B data providers in sequence, including Apollo, RocketReach, ContactOut, Hunter, Datagma, People Data Labs, and Prospeo, until one returns a work email or mobile number that passes its four-layer verification. You buy one subscription instead of twenty.
How much does BetterContact cost?
Starter is 15 dollars a month for 200 credits with a shorter provider chain. Pro runs from 49 dollars for 1,000 credits through 149 at 3,000, 199 at 5,000, 399 at 10,000, 799 at 20,000, 1,199 at 30,000, and 1,999 at 50,000. Enterprise starts at 799 dollars and adds bring-your-own API keys and a dedicated account manager.
Does a failed lookup consume a credit?
No. Credits are charged only when verified data is accepted. A contact that runs the entire provider chain without producing a verified result costs nothing at all. This is the single most consequential billing question in this category and BetterContact answers it in the strongest form available.
What happens with catch-all addresses?
Nothing is charged for them. The vendor states it is the only waterfall enrichment tool that charges nothing whatsoever for catch-alls. This matters more than it sounds: catch-all domains can be a large share of a European list, they are technically deliverable but practically a gamble, and most competitors bill for them as if they were verified.
How much does a mobile phone number cost?
Ten credits, published rather than negotiated. On the entry Pro plan that is about 49 cents per verified number, and around 40 cents at the 10,000 credit step. Phone numbers are verified before being billed rather than passed through unchecked. Datagma is cheaper per number at thirty of its own credits, roughly 33 to 49 cents, but runs a single source rather than a waterfall.
Do credits roll over?
Yes, but capped at twice your monthly subscription. A 5,000 credit plan can hold at most 10,000 accumulated credits. That is more generous than a hard monthly reset and less generous than Icypeas, whose credits never expire, or Datagma, which rolls monthly-plan credits for twelve months.
Can I use my own provider API keys?
Yes, on the Enterprise tier. That is the feature that changes the economics at scale: you pay BetterContact for the waterfall orchestration and verification while the underlying data bills against contracts you have already negotiated with the providers directly. On Starter and Pro you pay BetterContact's blended rate.
Where does the data come from?
From more than twenty upstream providers rather than from a database BetterContact owns. That is good for coverage and awkward for governance: the waterfall deliberately abstracts which provider supplied which record, so a full provenance answer requires understanding the sourcing practices of everyone in the chain. If your data policy requires naming the source of each record, this architecture will not satisfy it.
Is BetterContact GDPR compliant?
The vendor states GDPR, CCPA, and DSGVO compliance and is established in France, so it falls directly under GDPR with the CNIL as supervisory authority. It brokers lookups rather than holding a large owned contact database, which narrows its own footprint. As always, the lawfulness of contacting someone rests on your own legitimate interest assessment and your handling of objections, and in a waterfall you inherit the sourcing questions of every provider in the chain.
Is it worth paying a waterfall premium?
It depends on what a missed contact costs you. At about 4 to 5 cents per verified email, BetterContact is roughly four times Icypeas and twice Anymail Finder. If your lists are well covered and easy, that premium buys little. If you work international, mid-market, or hard-to-reach segments where a single provider returns half your list, the waterfall pays for itself immediately, and the fact that misses and catch-alls cost nothing puts a firm floor under the waste.
Editorial verdict
BetterContact is the clearest expression of the waterfall idea at a small business price. Twenty providers under one subscription, four-layer verification, one credit per verified email, ten per verified mobile, nothing at all for a miss, and nothing at all for a catch-all, with the whole ladder published from 15 dollars to 1,999 dollars a month. For an outbound agency, whose actual cost is the leads it never reaches and whose actual risk is a damaged sending domain, this is close to the correct default. The reservations are that it costs several times more per record than a good single source, that the waterfall deliberately obscures which provider supplied what, and that four people and a million dollars of revenue are carrying 150,000 enrichments a day. Buy it as a high-coverage component you could replace, not as infrastructure you assume will still be there in five years.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.