Email scraper
The three methods, the legal lines, and how verified emails actually land.
Three ways email scrapers get their emails
Every email tool on the market runs one of these three methods under the hood. Knowing which one you are buying tells you what the list will do to your bounce rate.
| Approach | Where the emails come from | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Website crawlers | Crawl pages and pull addresses out of the HTML: mailto links, contact pages, footers | Many sites list a generic info@ or nothing at all. You reach the company inbox more often than the decision maker |
| Database resellers | A stored list someone collected earlier, resold to you | Emails go stale as people change jobs. You cannot tell how old a row is until it bounces |
| Find and verify | Build the likely address from a person's name and their company domain, then check it before handing it over | Slower per contact, and it will not return an address it cannot confirm. That trade is the point |
CrustAPI runs the third method. Fewer emails come back, and the ones that do are worth sending to.
What is legal to collect
Stated neutrally: logged-out, public-only collection has repeatedly defeated computer-fraud and contract claims. Bright Data defended that ground in court against both Meta and X and still sells scraped data today.
CrustAPI stays on that ground: public pages only, no accounts, no fake profiles, nothing behind a login. Fake accounts, hacked lists, and private inboxes are a different legal story, and we do not touch them.
Collecting an address and emailing it are separate questions. CAN-SPAM in the US and GDPR in Europe govern the sending itself, whichever tool found the address.
None of this is legal advice; if real money rides on your case, ask a lawyer. For the LinkedIn side, see how to scrape LinkedIn without logging in.
How do you get verified emails?
CrustAPI's email data rides on its LinkedIn people search API (beta). You search public profiles by role, company, or keywords, and people results carry a verified email where one can be confirmed. An address that fails the check stays out of your data.
- 1
Create a free account. Try it free, no card needed.
- 2
Run a people search in the playground. Something like head of growth fintech.
- 3
Export the CSV, or copy your key and run the curl below.
The same endpoint family covers full profiles, company pages, jobs, and posts. The whole set is on the LinkedIn scraper API page, and the parameter reference is at /docs#linkedin.
Billing is the applicable price per successful call. A search that comes back empty costs nothing.
What Google Maps gives you instead
A lot of people type "email scraper" while hunting local business contacts. Here is the catch: Google Maps listings do not contain email addresses, so no maps scraper can return one, ours included.
Here is a real record from our Maps endpoint, captured August 4, 2026, and what it does carry.
Every maps record carries name, address, phone, website, rating, review count, categories, and hours. There is no email field anywhere in it.
Tools that promise "Google Maps emails" crawl each listing's website afterward and hope a contact page gives one up. That is the crawler approach from the table, with the usual info@ problem.
If local business data is what you need, the Maps endpoint answers in about 1 second, one of 12 Google types on the same key. Full page: Google Maps scraper API.
How much does it cost?
LinkedIn lookups bill the applicable price per successful call. Maps bills per business returned; other Google endpoints bill per successful request. Empty and failed requests are free.
| Deposit | Google Search / 1,000 requests | Maps / 1,000 businesses | LinkedIn reads / 1,000 requests | People, Jobs, Refresh / 1,000 units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10+ | $1.00 | $1.96 | $6.00 | $1.96 |
| $149+ | $0.76 | $1.49 | $4.50 | $1.49 |
| $549+ | $0.56 | $1.10 | $3.30 | $1.10 |
| $1,999+ | $0.41 | $0.80 | $2.45 | $0.80 |
| $6,500+ | $0.33 | $0.65 | $1.95 | $0.65 |
| $27,500+ | $0.28 | $0.55 | $1.65 | $0.55 |
| $50,000+ | $0.26 | $0.50 | $1.50 | $0.50 |
| $100,000+ | $0.20 | $0.40 | $1.50 | $0.40 |
Every eligible account gets $6 of free usage monthly. Each deposit keeps its prices until spent; paid funds never expire. People and Jobs bill per successful search, Refresh per accessible profile. Full profiles in People use the read rate per full profile. See all billing details.
Larger deposits unlock lower endpoint prices. Each deposit keeps its prices until spent. See the full deposit table on the pricing page. Prices in USD, ex-tax.
Everything is prepaid and self-serve, and paid funds never expire.
Who uses an email scraper?
- SDRs and outbound teams. Build a verified list for one niche and start sending without renting a stale database.
- Recruiters. Find people by role and company, then reach them at a confirmed work address.
- Clay and n8n builders. Add a find-and-verify email column to any table with one HTTP call per row.
- Founders. Run your first hundred prospect lookups yourself, free, inside the free tier.
When another tool is the better pick: if you want an all-in-one outreach platform, with sequences, inboxes, and a big prebuilt contact database behind a full sales UI, tools like Apollo and Hunter bundle all of that and do it well. CrustAPI is the data layer: fresh public data and verified emails over an API, priced per result. If you run Clay, n8n, or your own code on top, this is the fit.
Related: LinkedIn People Search API (beta) · LinkedIn Company Scraper · Google Maps Scraper API
Common questions
Logged-out, public-only collection has repeatedly defeated computer-fraud and contract claims, and that is the only ground CrustAPI operates on: no fake accounts, no logins, no private data. Sending cold email is governed separately by laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR, whichever tool found the address. This page is not legal advice; ask a lawyer about your specific case.
No, and no maps scraper can, because emails are not on the listings. Maps records carry name, address, phone, website, rating, review count, categories, and hours. Verified emails on CrustAPI come from the LinkedIn people endpoints.
An email only appears on a people result after it passes a verification check. When an address cannot be confirmed, we leave it out rather than guess from a name pattern. You get a smaller list that is worth sending to.
Public, logged-out pages that CrustAPI scrapes itself at request time. Nothing is resold from a stored database, so a result is as fresh as the moment you query it.
No. The playground at /app runs queries from a form, and the API plugs into Clay, n8n, MCP, LangChain, and CrewAI if those are your tools.
The $6 free allowance resets monthly. Paid funds stay available until spent.
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