People Data Labs Pricing [2026]: Per-Record Cost for Developers

Last updated: September 1, 2026. Every People Data Labs figure below was read from peopledatalabs.com/pricing or docs.peopledatalabs.com on September 1, 2026. Where PDL publishes nothing, this guide says so and says where the missing number lives.

People Data Labs sells a person and company dataset through APIs and flat files. Cleanlist is not a data company: it licenses from commercial providers and runs a waterfall across them. That difference decides most of this comparison, and this guide is explicit about which side each buyer belongs on.

How much does People Data Labs cost in 2026?

People Data Labs costs $98 a month on the Self-Serve plan, starting at 350 person records a month, or $940 a year for the same allowance (peopledatalabs.com/pricing, September 1, 2026). Both prices are labelled "Starting at", because PDL uses volume-based pricing where, in its own words, "discounts trigger as your usage grows". Below Self-Serve there is a free Testing tier at $0 for up to 100 records a month with contact fields obfuscated. Above it, Bulk Data is custom-priced and annual only. For a published comparison on the enrichment side, Cleanlist is $79, $229 and $599 a month for 1,500, 5,000 and 15,000 credits, with the API unlocking on Pro at $229.

What is the People Data Labs per-record cost?

Divide the plan price by the record allowance and the floor rates fall out cleanly:

Those are entry rates at the smallest allowance, and PDL states the per-record price falls as volume rises, though it does not publish the schedule. $0.28 per person record is the number to hold in your head when you model an integration, and $0.224 is the number if you can commit to a year. The comparable Cleanlist figure is about $0.046 for a verified email on Pro at $229 a month, though a Cleanlist credit buys one verified output rather than a full profile.

What does the free People Data Labs plan include?

The Testing tier is $0 with "Up to 100 credits/mo" and "Up to 100 records / mo", easy signup and no commitment. The catch is stated on the page in one line: "Free plan: emails, phone, & address data is obfuscated. Unlock with Pro." You can confirm that a record exists and inspect its non-contact fields, but you cannot read the email or the phone number. That makes the free tier a schema and coverage test rather than a working allowance. Cleanlist's free path is shaped the other way: every new workspace starts on Scale for 14 days with 250 credits, 3 seats, no card, and every feature except the public API and MCP, with real values returned, and the Free plan afterwards is $0 for 30 credits a month.

What does the Self-Serve plan cost and include?

$98 a month or $940 a year, starting at 350 records a month. It includes contact data, access to premium fields as a paid add-on, CSV enrichment, email support, and the full suite of Person APIs (peopledatalabs.com/pricing, September 1, 2026). Term length is monthly or annual, chosen at checkout. Self-Serve does not include data licensing, a designated customer success manager or SAML and SSO, all of which sit on Bulk Data. This is the tier most engineering teams actually buy, and the one where the $0.28 per record entry rate applies. Cleanlist gates its equivalent by plan rather than by tier name: REST API v2, roughly 30 endpoints, unlocks on Pro at $229 a month, and the MCP server at mcp.cleanlist.ai is in beta with 30-plus tools.

What does the Bulk Data plan cost?

Custom, and PDL will not narrow it on the page. Bulk Data is described as "Power your scaled product with custom volumes and white glove support", with annual contracts, flexible payment terms, formal data testing, additional field bundles, access to all APIs, Data License Feeds, a designated success team and SSO or SAML as an add-on. The call to action is "Contact sales" (peopledatalabs.com/pricing, September 1, 2026). The distinguishing feature is on-premise and flat-file bulk delivery, which no lower tier offers. If you need the dataset rather than lookups against it, this is the only tier that sells it. Cleanlist has no equivalent and no custom tier: it does not license bulk data, does not operate an owned contact database, and publishes Starter, Pro and Scale at $79, $229 and $599 a month.

Is the People Data Labs annual discount really 20%?

Yes, and the arithmetic is exact. PDL's page says "Save 20% and access all of the data upfront with annual commitments". Twelve monthly payments of $98 is $1,176; the annual price is $940, which is 20.07% below. The per-record effect is a drop from $0.280 to $0.224 at the entry allowance. The second half of that sentence matters as much as the first: on an annual commitment you get all the credits upfront rather than metered monthly, so a heavy backfill month does not stall against a monthly cap. Cleanlist's annual discount is 25%, which takes Pro from $229 a month to $171.75, or $2,061 a year, though Cleanlist credits refresh monthly rather than landing as a single annual pool.

What is the People Data Labs seat minimum?

There is none, because PDL does not price by seat. The meter is records retrieved, and the whole team shares an API key and a credit pool. That is a genuine advantage over per-seat data tools for engineering teams, where a data pipeline has no user to count. The nearest thing to a seat concept is SAML and SSO, which is an add-on and only on the Bulk Data tier. Cleanlist does count seats but includes them: 2 on Starter, 5 on Pro, 10 on Scale, 3 during the trial, with each extra seat at $20 a month.

What is the People Data Labs contract term?

Self-Serve is monthly or annual, your choice at checkout. Bulk Data is annual only, and PDL states it plainly in the term-length row of the comparison table (peopledatalabs.com/pricing, September 1, 2026). The free Testing tier has "no commitment". This is one of the more honest term structures in the category: a developer can start monthly, prove the coverage against their own records, and move to annual once the volume is known. Cleanlist bills month to month by default with the annual 25% discount as an option rather than a requirement.

What is metered on People Data Labs, and what runs out?

Credits, one per record retrieved, tracked per API call. PDL's docs expose the accounting in response headers: x-call-credits-spent reports "the number of credits that we billed for this API call" and x-totallimit-remaining reports how many credits are left (docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/usage-limits, September 1, 2026). Credits are bucketed by category, and the docs name eight: enrich, search, search_company, enrich_company, enrich_skill, enrich_job_title, preview_search and person_identify. That means a search credit and an enrich credit are not interchangeable, which is easy to miss when sizing a plan. Cleanlist's meter is one pool: 1 credit for a verified email, 10 for a direct dial, 11 for both, 1 for a company enrichment, 0 credits for search, and nothing charged when no data comes back.

What are the People Data Labs rate limits?

PDL does not publish them in its developer docs. The docs explain the mechanism, rate limiting "on a per-key basis" using "a fixed-window rate limiting strategy", with separate limits per endpoint measured per minute, day or month, and show an example at 100 requests per minute. For the actual per-plan numbers the docs link to a help centre article on plan types. That article returned HTTP 403 to an ordinary request on September 1, 2026, so the figures are not publicly readable at the time of writing. PDL's stated process is that Enterprise customers request increases through their customer success manager and Pro customers submit a support request. If throughput matters to your build, get the limit in writing before you commit. Cleanlist's REST API v2 unlocks on Pro at $229 a month across roughly 30 endpoints, and its MCP server at mcp.cleanlist.ai is in beta with 30-plus tools.

What are the hidden costs of People Data Labs?

Three, all disclosed but easy to skim past. Premium fields are an add-on on both Self-Serve and Bulk Data, so the headline record price does not include every attribute you may have assumed. SAML and SSO is an add-on, and only on Bulk Data, which pushes any team with a security review toward the custom tier. And credit categories are separate pools, so a plan sized for enrichment can run dry on search while enrichment credits sit unused. Cleanlist has no add-on catalogue: the plan price is the invoice, and one credit pool covers every operation.

How does People Data Labs compare per verified contact?

At the entry allowance, PDL is $0.280 per record monthly and $0.224 annual. Cleanlist Pro at $229 for 5,000 credits is about $0.046 per credit, and a verified email costs 1 credit, so roughly $0.046 per verified email and $0.46 per direct dial. The gap is real but the units are not identical: a PDL record is a full person profile across many attributes, billed whether or not you needed the whole thing, while a Cleanlist credit buys a specific verified output and is charged only when that output comes back. Cleanlist: Best for GTM teams that need verified contact data rather than a dataset to build on. It runs waterfall enrichment across 25+ providers and charges 1 credit per verified email and 10 per direct dial, with search costing nothing, starting at $79/month. That is the shape RevOps teams buy when the consumer of the data is a CRM rather than a product.

What does People Data Labs do that Cleanlist does not?

Several things, and they are the reason PDL exists. PDL licenses flat-file and on-premise bulk data, so you can hold the dataset rather than query it, which no Cleanlist plan offers. PDL is ISO and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, stated on its pricing page; Cleanlist is not SOC 2 certified, and any procurement process that requires it should stop reading here. PDL exposes person, company, skill and job-title enrichment as separate endpoints for product builders. Cleanlist's REST API v2 takes structured filters rather than natural language, and there is no natural-language search endpoint on it. If you are building a product on top of a person graph, PDL is the correct purchase and Cleanlist is not.

Who should buy People Data Labs, and who should not?

Buy People Data Labs if you are a developer or a data team, the consumer of the data is a system rather than a seller, and you want a per-record price you can model in a spreadsheet before you write the integration. The free Testing tier is a real coverage test even with contact fields obfuscated, and $98 a month is a low bar to prove the schema against your own records. Do not buy PDL as a sales team's day-to-day prospecting tool: there is no list UI, no CRM workflow and no seat model, and $0.28 a record for full profiles is expensive if all you needed was an email. Do not assume the free tier proves contact coverage, because the contact fields are the ones it hides. Cleanlist: Best for GTM teams buying verified contacts rather than a dataset to build a product on. It runs waterfall enrichment across 25+ providers and charges 1 credit per verified email and 10 per direct dial, with search costing nothing, starting at $79/month.

People Data Labs pricing at a glance

Every People Data Labs figure above came from peopledatalabs.com or docs.peopledatalabs.com, read on September 1, 2026. Volume-based pricing changes without a changelog, so re-check the page before you budget an integration. For the verification side of the same stack, see the Clearout pricing guide.