Hunter.io Alternative: Email Finder, No Domain Caps
People reach for a Hunter.io alternative for one of two reasons. Either the free plan's 50 credits a month and 10-emails-per-domain sample cap ran out the moment things got serious, or they realized Hunter solves only half the problem: it finds and verifies emails, but it does not build the lead list those emails belong to. You still need a separate tool to find who to email in the first place.
Kavex closes that gap. It is a B2B sales-intelligence tool with a built-in email finder and bulk verifier — and it sits on top of Google Maps and LinkedIn scraping, so you can go from "an industry and a city" all the way to "a verified, ready-to-send list" in one place. Email Finder is 5 credits per find, Email Verifier is 1 credit per address (1 credit ≈ $0.001), and every new account starts with 1,000 free credits, no card required.
What Hunter does, and where it stops
Hunter.io is a clean, well-known tool for what it does:
- Domain Search — list emails it knows for a given domain.
- Email Finder — guess a person's address from name + domain.
- Email Verifier — check deliverability.
The limits show up fast. The free tier is 50 monthly credits, and on that plan domain search returns only a small sample per domain. The cheapest paid plan is $34/month billed annually for 2,000 credits. And critically, Hunter starts from a name or a domain you already have. It will not tell you which 300 marketing agencies in your region to target — you bring that list, Hunter enriches it.
How Kavex does more of the funnel
Kavex treats email as the last step, not the only one.
Find emails by name and domain — or by crawling the site
Have a name and a company? Email Finder returns the most likely address with a confidence score and verification status. Want everything a company publishes? Point the Website Scraper at the domain (2 credits per page) and pull published emails, phones, social links and physical addresses. Because Kavex bills per result, there is no fixed "10 emails per domain" ceiling the way a free Hunter plan imposes.
Build the list first, with Maps and LinkedIn
This is the part Hunter does not do. Search Google Maps for a category and location and get businesses with name, phone, website, and address. Or pull a LinkedIn company's people to get the decision-makers at an account. Then run those rows through Email Finder + Verifier — the list and its emails come from the same tool.
Verify before you send
The Email Verifier checks syntax, MX records and the live SMTP response per address (1 credit each), and flags catch-all and disposable mailboxes. Even a 90%-accurate finder produces a 10% bounce rate on a 1,000-email list, which quietly damages your sender reputation — verifying first is the cheap insurance.
Hunter.io vs Kavex side by side
| Kavex | Hunter.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Find email by name + domain | Yes (5 cr/find) | Yes |
| Verify emails | Yes (1 cr/email) | Yes |
| Per-domain email cap | None (per-result) | Sampled on free plan |
| Build lead list from scratch | Yes (Maps + LinkedIn) | No — you bring the list |
| AI personalized opener | Yes (10 cr/email) | AI writing assistant |
| Pricing model | Pay-as-you-go | Monthly subscription |
| Free to start | 1,000 credits, no card | 50 credits/month |
Where Hunter.io is still the right pick
If all you want is a focused, polished email finder and verifier — no scraping, no list-building, no Maps — Hunter is excellent and dead simple, and its connected-mailbox and campaign features are more mature for sending directly from the same tool. Kavex stops at clean data export; it is not a cold-email sender. If your workflow is "I already have my prospect list and I just need addresses verified before it goes into my sequencer," Hunter is a fine, simple choice.
Who should switch to Kavex
You are a fit if you find yourself doing the dance of "scrape a list in tool A → upload to Hunter for emails → export again to verify." Founders, agencies and SMB sales teams who want one tool that finds the companies, finds the people, finds the emails, and verifies them get the most leverage here — without a monthly subscription floor.
Find your first emails free
Pick a domain you know, run Email Finder and Verifier, then try a Maps search to build a fresh list and enrich it end to end. The first 1,000 credits are free with no card — enough to feel where the bundled workflow saves you a step.
More from Kavex:
- How to find business emails from a domain
- How to verify emails before sending
- How to find decision-makers on LinkedIn
- Lead generation for marketing agencies
- PhantomBuster alternative for LinkedIn data
Start free — 1,000 credits, no card.
Pick a category and a city, run Google Maps, and export an enriched CSV.
Build your first lead list