How to Migrate Off Clearbit to a Pay-Per-Success Enrichment API

Clearbit doesn't exist as a standalone product anymore — HubSpot folded it into Breeze Intelligence, and the plain Enrichment API a lot of us called directly is being wound down. If you're staring at a migration, here's a practical way to do it without breaking your pipeline or overpaying along the way. I build one of the alternatives, so I'll flag that clearly and stay honest about what a migration can and can't carry over.

Step 1: Split Clearbit into the two jobs it actually did

Clearbit bundled two very different things: company data (firmographics — sector, tech stack, country, legal name) and people data (contacts — names, work emails, phone numbers). Most replacements do one well, not both. So before you pick anything, audit which Clearbit fields you actually use:

• If you only used company-level fields to qualify signups, route leads, or segment accounts — you need a firmographic API, and you can drop the contact database entirely.
• If you relied on contact emails/phones — that's a separate purchase (Apollo, ZoomInfo), and no firmographic-only API will replace it. Being honest with yourself here saves money and rework.

Step 2: Map your fields

The honest part of a migration is the bottom rows: employee count, revenue, and contacts don't come from a firmographic-by-domain API. If a vendor promises all of it cheaply, be skeptical.

Step 3: Pick a pricing model that survives a migration

During a migration you'll re-enrich your whole list — thousands of domains, many of them dead or parked. On a credit model where misses still cost you, that's money burned. Look for pay-per-success: billed only when the call returns real data. Worth saying honestly — this is becoming common (Clay, People Data Labs and Crustdata moved this way too), so treat it as a baseline to expect, not a unicorn.

Step 4: Re-enrich by domain, and handle the edge cases

The migration itself is usually a loop over domains. Two things Clearbit used to hide that you now want visible:

• Dead/parked domains — check domain_status and skip enrichment for dead/parked instead of paying for empties.
• Nulls — a good API returns null for what it can't verify; treat null as "unknown", never as a silent default.

Here's a real, live response (trimmed — tested in production while writing this):

{
  "domain": "free.fr",
  "firmographics": { "name": "Free", "legal_name": "FREE", "founded_year": 1999 },
  "tech": { "tech_stack": ["Nginx", "Next.js"], "domain_status": "active" },
  "data_sources": { "name": "web", "legal_name": "official_registry", "founded_year": "official_registry" },
  "meta": { "billed": true }
}

Notice data_sources and meta.billed: you can see where each field came from and whether the call was billable — exactly the visibility you want when you're re-running a big list and watching your spend.

What you can't carry over (and shouldn't pretend to)

To be blunt: a firmographic migration gives you company data, not people. Contacts, headcount and revenue need their own source. The clean mental model post-Clearbit is "firmographics here, contacts there" — two tools, each honest about its lane, instead of one black box you can't audit.

If the firmographic half is what you're migrating, you can try it on your own domains free — no signup for the first lookup: https://tools.coinduciel.com. Drop in a few of your real domains and check the field-by-field sources before you wire anything.

Disclosure: I build CDCSaaS, a firmographic-only enrichment API. I've kept the field mapping tool-agnostic where I can — if something looks off for your setup, tell me and I'll fix it.