Paying for the question, or for the answer
RocketReach is built around the lookup: you search for one person at a time and your plan is counted in lookups. Cuvy runs whole searches and charges one credit for each person it hands you an evidenced address for, nothing for the ones it misses. Pick RocketReach for scattered one-off lookups across many kinds of contact.
- RocketReach unit
- A lookup
- Cuvy unit
- A person found
- A lookup that misses
- Free on Cuvy
- How work arrives
- A whole search at once
50 addresses free every month · no card
A lookup is a question. A credit is an answer.
The exchange rate between them is your miss rate, and it belongs to your list rather than to either product.
Where a meter counts attempts, you have paid before you know whether there was anything to find; where it counts results, the people nobody has published an address for never reach the invoice. Which of the two you are on is a question for the vendor's own credit policy, not for this page. On a typical B2B search about 74%of people come back with something, so roughly a quarter of the attempts on that list bought nothing — but that ratio is not a constant. It moves with the industry, the company size and the country, and on your list it may be far better or far worse.
There is a second place the units separate, and it is easy to miss. Approach the same human twice from different directions — a name and a company this month, a profile link next month — and a per-person meter has already been paid: one credit, once, for as long as the workspace exists. Whether an attempt meter treats that as one thing or two depends entirely on what the vendor deduplicates.
None of which makes one model right. It makes the question answerable only with your own data, which is what the section below is for.
What each one charges you for
Model rows only. No price, lookup allowance or coverage figure for the other column appears here.
| Row | Cuvy | RocketReach |
|---|---|---|
| The unit you buy | A person an address was found for | A lookup |
| A lookup that returns nothing | Free, and not on the invoice | Governed by their lookup policy — worth reading first |
| Consulting several sources for one person | Still one credit | Depends on how they define a lookup |
| How the work arrives | A whole search page in one run, continuing in the background | A person at a time, searched across their sources |
| At the plan ceiling | The run pauses and asks; nothing is auto-billed | Stated in their plan terms |
| Unused allowance at month end | Rolls over to twice the monthly allowance; bought packs never expire | Stated in their billing terms |
| Primarily for | Turning a search you ran into a list you can send to | Finding contact details for a named person across many sources |
Three steps, one invoice, and it may go against us
The only comparison worth acting on is the one done on your own last month.
- One number
Count the rows you could actually send to
Open last month's export and count the people you were willing to email. Not rows delivered, not lookups spent, not records in the account — the ones that got a real address against a real name.
- Your true unit
Divide the whole invoice by that count
Everything you paid that month: the plan, the seats, the top-ups bought when it ran dry. That figure over that count is your real price per contactable person, and it is usually not the number on the pricing page.
- Then decide
Only then compare it with a per-person plan
Hold it against the per-address figure on our pricing page, and remember to subtract the people a per-person meter would never have charged you for at all.
If last month barely missed anybody — a clean list of well-documented companies — the two figures will land close together, and moving a working process for a few percent is not a good trade. The gap only pays for itself on lists with a long tail in them, which most prospecting lists have and some genuinely do not.
Three cases for buying lookups instead
Each of these is a shape of work Cuvy is not built for, and the billing model does not rescue it.
The person is not on a search you can run
A name from a podcast, a conference programme, a board listing, a paper. There is no results page behind those, and Cuvy needs either a search page or a spreadsheet of names before it has anything to work on.
You need more than an email address
Lookup tools pull several kinds of contact detail together for one person. Cuvy returns email and nothing else, so if the value is in having every channel in one record, that is a different product.
Your lookups are scattered, not batched
Five a week, unpredictable, across unrelated companies. Whole-search runs are the wrong shape for that pattern, and a tool priced per lookup is built for exactly it.
What people ask when they are used to buying lookups
If Cuvy checks three sources for one person, is that three lookups?
No. There is no unit called a lookup on a Cuvy invoice. However many places are consulted, and however many candidate addresses come back, one person costs one credit — and if none of it produces an address you would send to, it costs nothing at all.
I have a name and a company but no search page. What can Cuvy do?
One route today, and it is not a lookup box on this site — there is not one yet. Put the names and companies in a spreadsheet with a company column and upload it: the empty email column is filled in place, and only the rows an address is found for are charged. For a single person, the free plan in the web app does one lookup with nothing installed.
Does Cuvy return personal addresses as well as work ones?
Where it has seen one, yes, and it does not cost extra: work and personal addresses for the same human are one credit between them. Recruiters ask for this most, because the address a candidate reads on a Tuesday evening is rarely the one their employer runs.
Can I do a whole search at once rather than one person at a time?
That is the shape of the product. Cuvy counts the people on the results page, shows what the run would cost, and then works down it — about 3.8s of processing for 400 people — continuing in the background after you close the tab.
Is there an API if I want lookups from my own code?
Yes, on Pro and above, with the same rules as the extension: one credit per person handed an evidenced address, nothing for a miss, and a cost preview before a batch spends anything. A finished run is readable through the same API, so the file is not the only way to collect it.
How does a five-thousand-row job price itself before it starts?
It counts the rows first and tells you the ceiling — the most it could cost if every single person came back with an address. The real figure is always lower, because the misses drop out. If the ceiling is past your balance, it says so before it begins rather than halfway through.
50 addresses free every month · no card