Clearbit Extension: Everything You Need to Know Before Installing

If you're in sales, recruiting, or marketing, you've probably heard about the Clearbit extension. It's one of those tools that gets recommended constantly in B2B circles. But is it actually worth installing? And more importantly-is it the right tool for your specific workflow?

Here's what most articles won't tell you upfront: Clearbit Connect was officially sunset on April 30, and free Clearbit accounts are no longer being created. The landscape has changed dramatically since HubSpot's acquisition, and understanding what happened-and what your options are now-is critical before making any decisions.

Let's break down exactly what the Clearbit extension was, what it costs today, where it falls short, and what alternatives might serve you better depending on your goals.

What Is the Clearbit Extension?

Clearbit Connect was a free Chrome extension that integrated directly with Gmail, allowing you to find email addresses and company information without leaving your inbox. When you received an email or wanted to research a company, you could click the Clearbit icon to view detailed company information including size, revenue, and technology used.

The extension also let you search for contacts by company domain or employee name. Go to the "People" tab within the extension to see a list of employees, then click on a name to reveal their email address.

Here's the catch: every email reveal cost one credit, and each Connect user got 10 free credits per month. There was no way to increase your credit allocation on the free tier, and there is no way to buy more credits since Clearbit Connect is now a sunset product.

The Critical Update: Clearbit Connect Is Discontinued

This is the most important thing to understand before you waste time trying to install or use Clearbit Connect: all free Clearbit tools have been shut down as of April 30, including Free Platform, Connect, TAM Calculator, and Weekly Visitor Report.

After HubSpot's $150M acquisition, Clearbit Connect is being sunset, affecting 100,000+ users who must find alternatives. The standalone Chrome extension that made Clearbit popular no longer exists as an independent tool.

If you're searching for the Clearbit extension today, you'll find that Breeze Intelligence now requires a paid HubSpot subscription (minimum $30/mo) plus a Breeze credit pack (minimum $45/mo annual), and there is no longer a standalone free trial.

This means the tool that was once accessible to individual sales reps, freelancers, and small teams is now exclusively available to companies already invested in the HubSpot ecosystem-fundamentally changing who can actually use it.

What Data Does Clearbit Actually Provide?

Clearbit's enrichment capabilities pull from over 250 public and private sources. The data includes firmographic details like company size, industry, and revenue. You also get job titles, locations, and tech stack information.

The platform maintains a database of over 200 million contacts at 20 million companies. For company-level data, you can expect to see sector, headcount, annual revenue, and social profiles. For individual contacts, you'll get name, work email, location, title, role, seniority, and LinkedIn handle.

HubSpot claims Breeze Intelligence adds 100+ B2B data points on every contact or company in your target market, including technologies installed, employee count, revenue, location, and much more. The integration with HubSpot's CRM means this data automatically enriches your existing records in real-time.

The HubSpot Acquisition: What Changed

Here's something critical that many articles gloss over: Clearbit was an independent B2B data enrichment platform until its acquisition by HubSpot in December , and since the acquisition has been completely rebranded as Breeze Intelligence and is now natively integrated into the HubSpot ecosystem.

Clearbit is now essentially "Breeze Intelligence"-an add-on feature for existing HubSpot users. This means the standalone Clearbit experience has fundamentally changed. If you're not a HubSpot user, you'll find the integration pathway more complicated than it used to be.

HubSpot folded all those extras into its own workflows after the acquisition, but none of those features are actually free-they all eat away at your monthly HubSpot Credits, and the credit burn can quietly stack up into thousands of dollars.

The pricing structure has also shifted to a credit-based system tied to HubSpot's platform tiers. Plans start at $45/mo for an annual commitment, or $50/mo for the monthly option, which gives you 100 Breeze Intelligence credits and access to the Starter Customer Platform.

Perhaps most importantly for existing users, historical Clearbit APIs (Enrichment API, Logo API) have been deprecated, with the Logo API officially shut down on December 1, and API access today requires negotiating an enterprise contract with HubSpot (often 6 figures).

Clearbit Extension Pricing: The Real Numbers

Let's talk about what you'll actually pay if you want to use what was once Clearbit:

• Free tier: No longer available-the 10 credits per month via Clearbit Connect extension have been discontinued
• Breeze Intelligence (Starter): $45-50/month for 100 credits with annual commitment
• Professional/Enterprise: $1,184 to $4,135+ per month depending on your HubSpot tier
• API access: Starting at $99/month for 275 enrichment requests (if available)
• Enterprise contracts: Reports suggest pricing can reach $12,000-$100,000+ per year for larger organizations

The credit model can feel unpredictable. Every enrichment, form fill, and Buyer Intent push burns through credits that reset every month, can't be rolled over, and if you go over, HubSpot automatically charges you for more-that's why so many teams sign up thinking they're paying a few hundred dollars, only to watch their bill climb into the thousands once usage scales.

Users frequently mention surprise bills from credit overages, difficulty canceling or downgrading, and a lack of flexibility when budgets change. The inability to forecast costs accurately has become one of the most common complaints about the new pricing model.

Additionally, Breeze Intelligence credits expire every month with no rollover option-if you buy 100 credits and only use 50, the remaining 50 are lost at the end of the billing cycle. This "use it or lose it" approach creates pressure to consume credits even when you don't need the data, which can lead to wasteful prospecting habits.

Key Limitations of the Clearbit Extension

After reviewing user feedback and testing the tool, here are the main drawbacks:

No Longer Available as Standalone Tool

The most significant limitation is that Breeze Intelligence now requires a paid HubSpot subscription, and you cannot use the service without being in the HubSpot ecosystem, which represents a major change for historical Clearbit users.

You cannot use Breeze Intelligence with another CRM like Salesforce or Pipedrive without complex third-party integrations. This HubSpot dependency eliminates one of Clearbit's original value propositions: being a neutral data provider that worked with any sales stack.

Limited Free Credits (Now Zero)

Ten credits per month was barely enough for serious prospecting when the free tier existed. Now, with the complete elimination of free access, individual sales reps and small teams are priced out entirely. Unlike some competitors, there's no option to earn credits through referrals or engagement, and there's no free trial to test the data quality before committing to a paid annual plan.

No LinkedIn Integration

This is a significant gap. Clearbit doesn't currently offer integration with LinkedIn, which is where most B2B prospecting actually happens. Competitors like Cognism and Lusha offer browser extensions designed specifically for LinkedIn prospecting workflows, allowing you to enrich profiles directly while browsing Sales Navigator or company pages.

For modern sales workflows that rely on social selling and LinkedIn outreach, this limitation forces you to switch between tools constantly, adding friction to your prospecting process.

Company-Level Focus Over Individual Contacts

Breeze Intelligence is not ideal for individual prospecting-it's integrated within HubSpot and designed primarily to enrich inbound CRM records, not build outbound lead lists, and access is limited to HubSpot users on paid plans with pricing that scales with contact volumes.

This makes it less robust for cold outreach or building outbound campaigns from scratch. If you need verified mobile numbers, you'll need to look elsewhere-Clearbit doesn't offer phone-verified mobile data that many competing tools provide.

No Mobile Numbers

For sales teams that rely on phone outreach, this is a dealbreaker. The platform focuses on email enrichment but lacks direct dial and cell phone data that many competing tools provide. The platform does not provide phone numbers or email addresses for contacts, as the tool is only focusing on enriching contacts that already have email addresses in their contact records.

In today's multi-channel prospecting environment, having both email and phone data is essential for maximizing connection rates. Relying solely on email means you're missing opportunities to reach decision-makers who prefer phone conversations.

Credit System Creates Scarcity Mindset

Breeze Intelligence uses credits as part of its enrichment offering, and this pricing system promotes scarcity thinking, while alternatives like Cognism offer an unrestricted credit model that enables users to gather contacts or companies without worrying about extra costs.

When you're constantly monitoring credit usage and worrying about overages, it changes how you prospect. Instead of freely exploring leads and validating fit, you become conservative with your data requests, potentially missing opportunities because you're trying to preserve credits.

When Should You Use Breeze Intelligence (Formerly Clearbit)?

Despite its limitations, Breeze Intelligence makes sense in specific scenarios:

• You're already a HubSpot power user: The native integration is seamless and eliminates context switching. If your entire go-to-market motion runs through HubSpot, the unified experience may justify the cost.
• Data enrichment is your primary need: Clearbit excels at filling in firmographic gaps in your CRM. If you have existing leads and just need to enrich them with company data, it performs this function well.
• You have budget for enterprise tools: The data quality is generally high if cost isn't a primary concern. Large organizations with dedicated RevOps teams can manage the complexity and credit systems effectively.
• Marketing-led growth: Lead scoring, form shortening, and website visitor identification work well for inbound-focused teams. Extra form fields typically mean fewer qualified leads, and form shortening dynamically shortens your forms while still collecting the data you need to understand, score, and route your leads with speed and precision.
• Account-based marketing initiatives: The buyer intent features help identify high-value accounts showing purchase signals, which is valuable for ABM campaigns targeting specific company lists.

However, if you're building outbound campaigns, need LinkedIn integration, want phone numbers, or simply don't want to pay enterprise pricing for basic prospecting features, you have better options available.

Better Alternatives for Different Use Cases

Depending on what you're actually trying to accomplish, there are more focused tools available that don't require a HubSpot subscription:

For Email Finding and Verification

If your primary goal is finding valid email addresses, dedicated email finder tools often outperform Clearbit's extension. Findymail offers bulk email and phone number finding with strong accuracy rates and LinkedIn export capabilities, specifically optimized for outbound teams.

You should also verify any emails you find before sending campaigns. Our Email Verifier tool lets you instantly check if an email is valid, risky, or invalid-completely free. This saves you from wasted sends and protects your sender reputation, which is critical as email providers get stricter about bounce rates.

Email verification should be a standard step in every prospecting workflow. Even if you're getting emails from premium sources, verification ensures you're not damaging your domain reputation with hard bounces that could land you in spam folders.

For LinkedIn Prospecting

Since Clearbit lacks LinkedIn integration, you'll want a tool built for that workflow. Our Email Finder lets you find someone's email from their name and company or directly from their LinkedIn profile-no credit card required.

This approach aligns with how modern B2B prospecting actually works: you identify prospects on LinkedIn, then find their contact information to reach out. Tools that integrate directly into this workflow save significant time and reduce the friction of switching between platforms.

LinkedIn has become the primary prospecting channel for B2B sales, and your toolstack should reflect that reality. Any solution that requires you to leave LinkedIn, copy information to another platform, and then return to LinkedIn creates unnecessary steps that slow down your pipeline development.

For Finding Mobile Numbers

Phone-verified mobile numbers are critical for sales teams doing cold calling. Clearbit doesn't provide these, which is a significant gap for outbound-focused organizations. Try our Mobile Number Finder to get cell phone numbers from an email address or LinkedIn URL.

Mobile numbers have become increasingly valuable as decision-makers work remotely and are harder to reach through office lines. Having direct mobile access can dramatically improve connection rates, especially for enterprise sales where getting time with executives requires persistence across multiple channels.

The combination of email and mobile data creates redundancy in your outreach. If emails aren't getting responses, you can pivot to calling. If calls go to voicemail, you can follow up with a contextual email referencing your call. Multi-channel persistence is what breaks through to busy prospects.

For B2B Company Targeting

If you need to identify and research target companies before finding contacts, generic enrichment tools can feel like overkill. Our B2B Targeting Generator uses AI to analyze your ideal customer profile and generate targeted company lists based on industry, size, technology stack, and buying signals.

This approach is often more practical than Clearbit's Reveal feature because you can define specific targeting criteria upfront rather than waiting to enrich visitors after they land on your site. Starting with the right target list ensures every subsequent prospecting activity has a higher likelihood of success.

Good targeting eliminates wasted effort. When you're reaching out to companies that genuinely fit your ICP, your messaging resonates better, your conversion rates improve, and your sales cycle shortens. Investing time in targeting pays dividends throughout the entire customer acquisition process.

For Sales Intelligence and Outreach

Tools like Clay combine data enrichment with automation, letting you build prospecting workflows that pull from multiple data sources simultaneously. This "waterfall" approach checks multiple providers until it finds valid contact data, giving you better coverage than relying on a single source.

Reply.io and Instantly offer full outreach platforms with built-in data capabilities, allowing you to find contacts and launch email campaigns from the same interface. This consolidated approach reduces tool sprawl and simplifies your tech stack.

For teams focused on intent data and account-based targeting, Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) provides website visitor tracking with real-time behavioral insights and lead scoring. This helps you identify which companies are actively researching solutions like yours, so you can prioritize outreach to warm leads.

Close combines CRM functionality with built-in calling and email, creating a complete sales workspace. For teams that want to minimize context switching, having contact data, communication tools, and deal management in one place significantly improves efficiency.

For Background Checks and Due Diligence

When you're vetting potential clients, partners, or high-value prospects, surface-level firmographic data isn't enough. Our Background Checker provides comprehensive background reports with trust scores, helping you assess the credibility and risk profile of the companies and individuals you're considering doing business with.

This is particularly valuable for enterprise sales where deal sizes justify additional due diligence, or for agencies vetting potential clients to avoid problematic engagements. Understanding who you're talking to before investing significant time in the sales process protects your resources and reputation.

For Technology-Based Targeting

If your product or service serves companies using specific technologies, you need to identify prospects based on their tech stack. Our Tech Stack Scraper helps you find websites using specific technologies, allowing you to build targeted lists of companies that are ideal fits for your solution.

Technographic targeting is especially powerful for B2B SaaS companies, agencies offering migration or integration services, and tools that complement existing platforms. When you know a company uses Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, or any other platform relevant to your offering, your outreach becomes significantly more relevant and your conversion rates improve.

How to Set Up a Free Prospecting Stack

Here's a practical workflow that replicates most of what you'd use Clearbit for-at no cost:

1. Define your target market: Use our B2B Targeting Generator to identify companies that match your ICP. Input your ideal customer characteristics and let AI generate a targeted company list.
2. Find decision-makers: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator or free LinkedIn search to identify key contacts at target companies. Look for job titles, seniority levels, and department indicators that signal decision-making authority.
3. Get email addresses: Use our Email Finder to find verified email addresses from names and company domains. This works directly with LinkedIn profiles, streamlining the workflow.
4. Verify before sending: Run all emails through our Email Verifier to avoid bounces. This protects your sender reputation and ensures your campaigns actually reach inboxes.
5. Find phone numbers when needed: Use our Mobile Number Finder for direct dials when your outreach strategy includes calling or when email response rates are low.
6. Check backgrounds for high-value prospects: Before investing significant time in large deals, use our Background Checker to validate company legitimacy and assess risk factors.
7. Launch outreach campaigns: Use tools like Instantly or Smartlead to automate your email sequences while maintaining personalization.

This stack covers company targeting, contact discovery, email finding, verification, and multi-channel outreach-all without the credit limitations and HubSpot dependency of Clearbit. More importantly, it's modular: you can swap out individual components as your needs evolve without being locked into a single ecosystem.

Top Clearbit Alternatives Compared

If you're specifically looking for data enrichment platforms similar to what Clearbit offered, here are the leading alternatives:

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a titan in the sales intelligence space, known for its extensive database of B2B contacts and companies, offering prospecting, data enrichment, intent signals, and sales engagement tools-while Clearbit focuses heavily on enrichment and website visitor identification, ZoomInfo provides a broader suite of capabilities for the entire sales cycle.

Best for: Enterprise teams with substantial budgets who need comprehensive coverage and advanced intent data. The pricing reflects its enterprise positioning, often starting at five figures annually.

Apollo.io

Apollo.io has rapidly gained popularity as an all-in-one sales intelligence and engagement platform that combines a robust B2B database with powerful sales engagement features, making it a strong alternative to Clearbit, especially for teams looking to consolidate their tools-while Clearbit primarily provides data for other tools, Apollo.io enables users to find leads and then engage with them directly from the platform.

Best for: Mid-market teams who want data and outreach in one platform. The unified interface reduces tool sprawl and simplifies workflows considerably.

Cognism

Cognism is a leading B2B sales intelligence platform particularly strong in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) data coverage and GDPR/CCPA compliance-while Clearbit focuses on data enrichment and website visitor identification, Cognism provides a more robust prospecting solution with a strong emphasis on legal compliance.

Cognism offers Diamond Data® (Phone-Verified Mobiles), a unique dataset of human-verified mobile numbers, which are highly valuable for direct outreach, and emphasizes GDPR and CCPA compliance, providing peace of mind for data usage.

Best for: European companies or global organizations targeting EMEA markets who need compliant, verified mobile phone data for outbound calling.

RocketReach

RocketReach is a broad B2B contact database that helps you find verified emails, direct dials, and company insights across 700M+ professionals, with strength from fast, multi-filter search, solid LinkedIn and company-site coverage, and an API that slots into custom prospecting workflows-compared to Clearbit, RocketReach delivers wider contact reach and more flexible data retrieval.

Best for: Teams who prioritize breadth of coverage and need an API for custom integrations. The Chrome extension makes it easy to use while browsing LinkedIn or company websites.

Lead411

Lead411 is a US-centric B2B data platform that provides verified emails, direct dials, company insights, and real-time updates, especially strong for US contacts backed by a rigorous verification engine and built-in intent data that highlights accounts actively researching solutions.

Best for: US-focused sales teams who want intent signals combined with contact data. The real-time trigger notifications for job changes and funding events help with timely outreach.

Understanding Data Quality vs. Coverage Trade-offs

When evaluating Clearbit alternatives, it's important to understand that no single provider has perfect data on every contact. Different providers excel in different areas:

Coverage refers to how many contacts a provider has in their database. Larger databases like ZoomInfo and Apollo offer broader coverage but may have lower accuracy rates on individual records.

Accuracy refers to how current and correct the data is. Providers that emphasize verification, like Cognism's Diamond Data or Findymail's validation, typically have smaller databases but higher accuracy.

The ideal approach for most teams is using a "waterfall" methodology: check multiple providers in sequence until you find valid data. Tools like Clay make this easy by automatically checking multiple sources and returning the first valid result, giving you the best of both coverage and accuracy.

The Rise of Intent Data and Why It Matters

One area where modern alternatives have evolved beyond Clearbit's original offering is intent data. Intent signals help you identify which companies are actively researching solutions like yours, allowing you to prioritize outreach to warm leads rather than cold prospects.

Intent data comes from various sources: website visitor identification, content consumption patterns, job postings, technology adoption signals, and third-party intent networks. Tools like 6sense and Demandbase specialize in aggregating these signals to help you identify accounts in active buying cycles.

For most teams, the combination of good targeting data plus basic website visitor tracking provides sufficient intent signals without requiring expensive intent platforms. Tools like Dealfront offer website identification that shows which companies are visiting your site, what pages they view, and how frequently they return-valuable signals for prioritizing outreach.

Making the Right Choice for Your Team

The Clearbit extension isn't a bad tool-it's just designed for a specific use case that may not match your needs, and more importantly, it's no longer accessible as the standalone, free tool it once was. If you're a HubSpot-native team focused on inbound marketing with budget for premium data enrichment, Breeze Intelligence can work well.

But if you're building outbound campaigns, need LinkedIn integration, want phone numbers, or simply don't want to pay enterprise pricing for basic prospecting features while being locked into a single ecosystem, you have better options.

The B2B data landscape has evolved significantly since Clearbit first launched. You no longer need to pay thousands per year for basic contact enrichment. Start with free tools that solve your specific problems, then upgrade to paid solutions only when you've validated the workflow and hit genuine scale limitations.

Consider your specific workflow needs:

• Are you primarily enriching existing CRM records, or building new prospect lists from scratch?
• Do you need LinkedIn integration as part of your daily prospecting flow?
• Is phone outreach a significant part of your sales motion, requiring mobile numbers?
• Are you working within a specific geographic market that certain providers cover better?
• Do you need intent signals to prioritize which accounts to target first?
• What's your actual monthly volume of new contacts, and how does that translate to credit consumption?

Answering these questions honestly will guide you toward the right solution faster than chasing brand names or defaulting to the tool everyone mentions.

The Future of B2B Data Tools

The consolidation trend represented by HubSpot's acquisition of Clearbit is likely to continue. Large platforms want to own the entire customer data journey, which means standalone point solutions will increasingly either get acquired or need to specialize deeply in specific use cases.

For users, this creates a choice: embrace integrated suites like HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence that handle everything within one ecosystem, or build modular stacks using best-of-breed specialized tools connected through integration platforms.

The modular approach offers more flexibility and often better pricing, but requires more technical sophistication to maintain. The integrated approach is simpler but creates vendor lock-in and can become expensive as your usage scales.

Neither approach is inherently better-the right choice depends on your team size, technical resources, budget constraints, and how much control you want over your data infrastructure.

Getting Started with Galadon's Free Prospecting Tools

Rather than committing to an expensive platform before validating your prospecting workflow, start with free tools that let you test different approaches without financial risk.

Test our B2B Targeting Generator to see how AI-powered targeting compares to traditional enrichment approaches. You might find that starting with better targeting eliminates the need for expensive enrichment tools altogether, since you're reaching out to better-fit prospects from the start.

Use our Email Finder and Email Verifier together to build a reliable email prospecting workflow. The combination of finding and verification ensures you're sending to valid addresses, protecting your sender reputation while maximizing deliverability.

Add our Mobile Number Finder when you're ready to incorporate phone outreach, giving you the multi-channel approach that top-performing sales teams use to break through to decision-makers.

For teams ready to level up their entire go-to-market approach, consider Galadon Gold. For $497/month, you get access to 4 live group calls per week with sales experts who can help you optimize your entire prospecting workflow, plus direct access to proven cold email frameworks and a community of 100+ active sales professionals. This hands-on coaching often delivers more value than expensive software by helping you use your existing tools more effectively.

The B2B prospecting landscape has changed dramatically. The tools that worked five years ago-like the original Clearbit Connect-have been acquired, repriced, or discontinued. But this disruption has created opportunities for new approaches that are often more effective and accessible than the legacy solutions.

Start with the fundamentals: good targeting, valid contact data, personalized messaging, and consistent follow-up. Master those before adding complexity. The best prospecting stack is the one you'll actually use consistently, not the one with the most features or the biggest brand name.