Cleanlist
Cleanlist is a Toronto-built B2B data platform that cascades every lookup through 25+ providers, verifies each work email at the live mailbox, qualifies the row with AI, and writes the finished record straight into HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive.
What is Cleanlist?
Cleanlist is a B2B data platform built in Toronto that sits between your idea of a buyer and a finished record in your CRM. Its core mechanism is waterfall enrichment: rather than resolving a lookup against one proprietary database, Cleanlist queries 25+ licensed providers in sequence, cheapest first, and stops at the first verified hit. Email and phone run down separate cascades, and each row shows which provider answered. The company owns no contact database and operates no crawler of its own, so every search is a live call rather than a read from a stale index. On its own stratified 500-lead benchmark it reports 98% verified work email and 85% direct dial coverage, against 70-80% and 30-60% for single-source tools, with up to 180 firmographic properties per record.
The product runs in five moves. You describe the people you want in plain English and Cleanlist writes the filters, showing a live count before a credit is spent. Enrichment then fills in the email and the direct dial. Every address is checked three ways - syntax, DNS and MX, then an SMTP handshake with the mailbox - and catch-all domains are labelled rather than confirmed. Smart Agents read each company's site and news to answer a question you write yourself, returning the answer, a score and a link to where it came from. Finally the list writes back to HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive over OAuth, or out to Outreach, Salesloft and Lemlist. Cleanlist never sends the email itself.
All of it is available programmatically too: a REST API v2 of roughly thirty endpoints, and an MCP server that lets Claude or ChatGPT run the same searches and enrichments under signed spend quotes. A Chrome extension puts the same panel on LinkedIn, on any company website and inside Salesforce, while a visual Playbook Builder chains the steps into a scheduled workflow. Pricing follows results rather than seats: search costs nothing, a verified email is one credit, a direct dial ten, and a lookup that finds nothing is never billed.
What it does
- Turn a plain-English description of your buyer into a saved, editable search with a live result count
- Find a verified work email and a direct dial through a cascade of 25+ data providers
- Check every address at the live mailbox and flag catch-all domains instead of passing them off
- Ask a question of your own about every row and get a sourced answer back as a column
- Score each lead against your ideal customer profile from 0 to 100 and reorder the list by fit
- Sync finished records two ways with HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, and out to Outreach, Salesloft or Lemlist
- Run the whole motion from a visual playbook, the REST API or an MCP-connected AI assistant
When to use Cleanlist / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Cleanlist is the right fit.
When to use Cleanlist
- Outbound sales teams - SDRs, BDRs and account executives building verified prospect lists
- RevOps teams keeping a CRM clean and running enrichment on a schedule
- Founders and small teams starting outbound who need coverage without a per-seat bill
- Agencies enriching client data across many accounts from one shared credit wallet
- GTM engineers and developers driving search and enrichment from the REST API or an MCP-connected assistant
When not to use Cleanlist
- Teams shopping for a sending tool: Cleanlist fills and verifies the list but never sends the email
- Anyone who only needs to clean a list sourced elsewhere - there is no public verification endpoint
- Buyers whose procurement requires SOC 2, a signed DPA or a contractual uptime commitment
- Developers who need webhooks, bulk dataset licensing, or revenue, technographic and intent targeting
- Consumer marketers, and anyone making credit, hiring or insurance decisions - the privacy policy forbids that use
How to use Cleanlist
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open an account on the web app - every new workspace starts on a 14-day Scale trial with 250 credits, three seats and no card
- Describe the buyer you want in plain English, or set the structured filters for title, seniority, department, industry, headcount, funding and location
- Read the live result count, refine the search while it is still free, and save it as a list
- Launch enrichment for a work email, a direct dial or both, after reviewing the cost estimate
- Let validation run its three checks and read the deliverable, risky and catch-all labels on each row
- Ask a Smart Agent a qualifying question about every row, then sort the list by its ICP score
- Connect HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive over OAuth and set the field mapping and overwrite rules
- Push the finished list into the CRM, or out to Outreach, Salesloft or Lemlist with an API key
- Install the Chrome extension to prospect straight from LinkedIn, any company site or a Salesforce record
- On a paid plan, wrap the sequence into a playbook or call it from the REST API or the MCP server
Pros & Cons
Pros
- You pay for results: a lookup that finds nothing is never billed, on any plan including Free
- Search is free and unlimited everywhere, so a segment can be sized before a credit is spent
- No per-seat licence - seats come with the plan and the whole team draws on one credit wallet
- Accuracy claims arrive with their method: a stratified 500-lead benchmark, published rather than asserted
- Unusually candid about its gaps - no SOC 2, no SLA, no webhooks and no enrichment idempotency are all stated on the API page
- SMTP verification is built into enrichment, so no second validation tool is needed
- A complete programmable surface: documented REST API, MCP server, zero-credit structured search and signed spend quotes
Cons
- No SOC 2 certification and no uptime SLA, which the vendor itself confirms
- No published data processing agreement, no subprocessor list and no Article 27 EU representative
- The privacy policy lists training LLMs and other AI models among its uses, with no documented way to opt out
- API v2 has no webhooks and no idempotency key on enrichment, so polling and your own ledger are on you
- Some responses come back as HTTP 200 with null fields - industry, headcount, revenue range, tech stack
- The public API and MCP server are excluded from the trial, and the API opens only on Pro and above
- No mobile app and no hosting country published anywhere on the site
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available at no cost, providing 30 credits a month on a single seat with no card required. Paid subscriptions start with the Starter plan at USD 79.00 per month on monthly billing, or USD 59.00 per month when billed annually, annual billing carrying a 25% discount. Every new workspace additionally opens on a 14-day Scale trial with 250 credits and three seats, again without a card. There are no setup fees and no mandatory annual contract.
- USD 0 per month
- 30 credits a month
- 1 seat
- 100 leads per list
- 25+ provider enrichment
- Chrome extension
- credit rollover
- CSV export
- USD 79 per month monthly
- or USD 59 per month annually
- 1
- 500 to 3
- 000 credits a month
- 2 seats
- 2
- 500 leads per list
- USD 229 per month monthly
- or USD 172 per month annually
- 5
- 000 to 10
- 000 credits a month
- 5 seats
- CRM import and integrations
- two-way CRM sync
- from USD 599 per month monthly
- or USD 449 per month annually
- up to USD 3
- 899 per month at the highest volume
- 15
- 000 to 100
- 000 credits a month
- 10 seats
- USD 20 per month monthly
- or USD 15 per month annually
- on any paid plan
- 250 credits
- 3 seats
- no card
- every feature except the public API and MCP server
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Cleanlist handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR is addressed head-on rather than in passing. The privacy policy names legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) as the basis for holding business contact data on people in the EEA and the UK, states that objections will be honoured, and relies on the source provider's consent where local law requires it. Access, correction, deletion, objection and opt-out of sale or sharing are open to anyone, customer or not: an email to contact@cleanlist.ai with the subject line Data Request gets a free answer within thirty days, escalating to the Privacy Officer and then a supervisory authority. The page metadata claims the policy is GDPR and CCPA compliant. The paperwork is what is missing: no Article 27 EU representative is named, no data processing agreement is published, no subprocessor list exists, and the vendor states it holds no SOC 2 certification.
Who owns the data?
The terms give the site and everything published on it to CleanList or its licensors. Whatever a user submits stays the user's on paper, but it comes with a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence for CleanList to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate, display, distribute and sublicense it, for running, promoting and improving the platform. The contact records are a separate matter: Cleanlist runs no crawler and holds no database of its own, licensing every record from nine named B2B providers. It may anonymise any information and reuse it for any legitimate business purpose without notice or consent, and may pass data to affiliates, contractors, a buyer in a merger or bankruptcy, and to authorities on legal process.
Reuse rights
Enriched records are yours to move: export them to CSV, pull them back as JSON through the API, or push them into HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Outreach, Salesloft and Lemlist without asking permission. The terms restrict only the website's own content, which may be copied for personal, non-commercial use and nothing further. The real limit sits in the privacy policy: the records exist so customers can identify, contact and qualify business prospects, and must not feed consumer marketing or any credit, employment, insurance or similarly consequential decision. Anyone whose details appear can email contact@cleanlist.ai to see, correct, delete or object, free of charge and without an account, with a reply promised inside thirty days. Once a customer has exported a record, however, that copy belongs to the customer and Cleanlist cannot delete it on anyone's behalf.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting country or region is published anywhere on the site, which is a notable silence for a platform holding business contact data about third parties. What is stated is jurisdictional: Cleanlist is a Canadian company, its privacy policy reasons in Canadian law, and it warns that personal information may be processed, stored and transferred to a foreign country whose privacy laws may not be as comprehensive as Canada's, with the user's consent deemed given by use of the site. Service providers must meet CleanList's standards and applicable Canadian privacy legislation. Security is described in general terms: physical, electronic and administrative measures, storage behind firewalls on secure servers, and no guarantee for data in transit over the internet. The terms are governed by Ontario and Canadian federal law, with exclusive jurisdiction in Ontario or the Federal Court of Canada. No data processing agreement, subprocessor list or SOC 2 report exists to fill in the detail.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Cleanlist.
- The tool exists to contact people who never asked to be contacted: GDPR, CASL and CAN-SPAM compliance for that outreach stays entirely with you
- The privacy policy lists training LLMs and other AI models among its uses of collected information, with no documented way to exclude your data
- The terms take a worldwide, irrevocable licence over anything you submit, and allow the vendor to anonymise information and reuse it commercially without notice
- No hosting country is published and transfers outside Canada are explicitly foreseen, to jurisdictions whose protections may be weaker
- A 98% verification rate still leaves errors: treating a score or a catch-all label as a guarantee will bounce campaigns and call the wrong people
- Playbooks and AI agents industrialise whatever targeting logic you give them, mistakes included, and AI-written columns still need a human read
- Credit billing rewards discipline: enrichment has no idempotency key, so a resubmitted record is charged again and a loosely bounded agent spends fast
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for everyday use. Sign-up is self-serve, the trial needs no card, searches are written in plain English and the Chrome extension installs in a click. Connecting a CRM is OAuth with no managed package, though deciding the field mapping and per-field overwrite rules is real RevOps thinking. Sequencers connect with an API key and the Playbook Builder is visual by design. Only the programmatic surface demands a developer: the REST API returns asynchronous results by polling, has no webhooks and no idempotency key on enrichment, so retries and a ledger of enriched records are the client's job.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Cleanlist
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Cleanlist.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly does Cleanlist do?
What is waterfall enrichment?
How accurate is the data?
How does the pricing work?
Is there a free plan or a trial?
Which tools does it connect to?
Is there an API and does it support webhooks?
Is Cleanlist SOC 2 certified?
My details are in the platform and I am not a customer. What can I do?
Who is behind Cleanlist and where is it based?
Should you pick Cleanlist?
Cleanlist knows what it is and stops there. It finds buyers, fills in a verified work email and a direct dial, checks every address at the mailbox, qualifies the row with AI and hands the result to your CRM or sequencer - and it does not send the email. The differentiator is not a proprietary database but the orchestration of 25+ licensed providers plus verification before delivery, which is a genuinely different bet: coverage risk moves to the vendor rather than your credit balance, since search is free and a miss is never billed. The pricing follows that logic, charging for results rather than seats.
What is unusual is the candour. The API page states outright that there is no SOC 2 certification, no uptime SLA, no webhooks on v2 and no idempotency key on enrichment, and it names the response fields that come back empty. Few vendors document their own gaps that precisely, and it makes evaluation faster.
The real blind spot is data governance. There is no published data processing agreement, no subprocessor list, no Article 27 EU representative and no stated hosting country, while the privacy policy lists training LLMs and other AI models among its uses with no documented opt-out. For a tool that holds business contact data about people who never signed up, that gap deserves a question before signing. The company is young - founded in 2024 by three Toronto co-founders, with public ratings still resting on small samples.
For a North American GTM team, a RevOps function or an agency that wants multi-provider coverage without building a waterfall, it is a serious option, best weighed against Apollo, Clay, ZoomInfo and Cognism - all of which Cleanlist compares itself to in the open.
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