thecompaniesapi.com

What is The Companies API?

The Companies API is a company-data API: you send it an identifier such as a domain name, email address or social network URL, and it returns a structured company profile. According to its own page, a single call can return 300+ data points, covering basics like legal name, industries, employee count and founding year, plus domain details, social profiles, logos, financial signals such as revenue band and stock ticker, and relationship data such as acquisitions and subsidiaries.

Who it is for

• Product teams adding company lookup, auto-fill or "similar companies" features.
• Sales and marketing tools that need to enrich leads or segment accounts by industry, size or location.
• Developers who want company data behind a normal API rather than maintaining their own database.

What makes it distinctive

The page emphasises breadth in one response and real-time processing, with a large company database and high request volume cited as evidence of scale. It also lists enrichment by domain, email or social URL, similar-business search, and event notifications, so it can support monitoring use cases and not just one-off lookups.

Trade-offs to weigh

A broad schema means many fields, some of which will be irrelevant or empty for smaller companies, so plan for missing values. Banded fields (for example, employee or revenue ranges) are easier to filter on but less precise than exact figures. Enrichment quality also varies by region and company size, so test against your own list before committing.

Practical next step

Pick 20–50 companies you already know well, run them through the free credit allowance, and check accuracy on the fields your feature actually depends on. Compare that against alternatives such as Clearbit or Crunchbase if you need different coverage or bundled tools.

How can I enrich a company profile from a domain name using the API?

Send the domain to the enrichment endpoint and read the returned company profile. The Companies API is built around exactly that flow: its page headline is "Turn a domain name into a company profile," and it describes enriching companies in a single API call with 300+ data points. The sample response on the page shows a domain block (domain, alias, registrar, status) alongside about, finances, locations, socials and analytics blocks, so one call can populate a full profile rather than just a name and logo.

What the enrichment actually returns

In the documented response shape, a domain lookup can give you:

• Identity: legal and display name, name alternatives, business type, year founded and founding place.
• Classification: industry and industry list, languages.
• Size and money: employee count both as a band (over-10k) and an exact figure, revenue band, stock exchange and ticker.
• Web presence: monthly visitors band, domain registrar and status, social profile links.
• Descriptions and assets: primary description, tagline, mission-style website text, logo and cover images.
• Relationships: acquisitions and subsidiaries.

The page also states you can enrich by domain, email or social network URL, and separately search companies, find similar businesses and subscribe to event notifications. Those are different endpoints from a straight domain-to-profile lookup, so decide which one your feature needs before you build.

A concrete integration path

1. Collect the domain at the point where you already have it — signup form, CRM record, or a user pasting a URL. Normalize it first (strip https://, www., paths and query strings) so www.microsoft.com and microsoft.com resolve to the same record.
2. Call the enrichment endpoint with that domain and parse the JSON into your own schema. Don't bind your database columns directly to their field names; map them, because bands like over-10k and exact values like 221000 are different types and you may want to store both.
3. Cache the result against the domain with a timestamp. Company data changes — headcount, revenue band, domain status — so treat the profile as a snapshot, not a permanent fact.
4. Handle the miss case explicitly. Domains that are parked, newly registered, or not in the database will return thin or empty blocks. Your UI should degrade to "we couldn't find details for this domain" rather than render blank fields.

Choosing between enrichment and search

The trade-off is straightforward: enrichment is precise but only works when you already hold an identifier. Search is broader but returns candidates you must filter and deduplicate yourself.

Practical notes

The page advertises 500 free credits with no credit card required and a 20-minute demo booking, and its meta block in the sample response includes cost, credits and freeRequest fields — so check the credit cost per call before wiring enrichment into a high-traffic path like page views. If every profile view triggers a lookup, credit consumption scales with traffic, not with customers. Cache aggressively and refresh on a schedule instead.

For a typical use case — a B2B signup flow that wants to pre-fill company name, industry, headcount band and logo from the work email domain — a single cached enrichment call per new account is enough, and the assets.logoSquare and descriptions.primary fields cover most of the visible UI. Accounts in the same domain should share one cached record.

As a next step, make one test call with a domain you know well and compare the returned about, finances and locations blocks against public information. That tells you quickly which fields are reliable enough for your product and which you should show as "estimated" or hide.

What pricing plans and free credit options are available?

The site advertises a free starting allowance rather than a published price list in the material provided: new users can get 500 free credits with no credit card required, and a 20-minute demo can be booked. Beyond that, the available information points to a separate pricing page, so the exact tiers, credit costs per request, and any subscription terms would need to be checked there.

What is confirmed

• 500 free credits on signup.
• No credit card required to start.
• A demo booking option for a walkthrough.
• A dedicated pricing page exists at The Companies API (Pricing).

What is not confirmed

• The names, limits, or monthly cost of paid plans.
• How many credits a single enrichment call consumes.
• Whether credits expire, roll over, or reset monthly.
• Any enterprise or custom-quote tier.

Practical decision criterion

If you are evaluating this for a product feature, the free credits are best treated as a proof-of-concept budget. Start with a small batch of domains you already know well, measure how many credits each enrichment consumes, and compare that against your expected monthly call volume. That tells you more about real cost than any headline plan name.

For a concrete scenario: a small SaaS team enriching signup domains might exhaust 500 credits quickly if each lookup returns a full company profile. A team testing a single integration path, by contrast, can stretch the allowance across several days of development. The right next step is to open the pricing page and confirm the credit-to-request ratio before committing to a paid tier.

How do I find companies similar to a given business?

Use the "find similar businesses" capability: you give the API a reference company (typically its domain), and it returns other companies judged similar to it. On The Companies API, this sits alongside search and enrichment in the same product, and the response schema shows a similarity field under meta, which is where a match score for that kind of query would appear.

H3 How a similarity lookup usually works

1. Pick a seed: a domain, company name, or profile you already have.
2. Query the API for similar companies.
3. Read the returned profiles and any similarity score.
4. Filter and rank locally against your own criteria.

H3 What to use as the seed

• Domain is the cleanest input, since the same company can appear under different names.
• Email or social URL also work for enrichment, so you can build a seed from a CRM record rather than a website.
• Avoid using a bare name if it is ambiguous; you will pull the wrong company.

H3 A concrete scenario A sales tool wants "companies like this prospect" for a lookalike list. You store the prospect's domain, call the similarity endpoint, then enrich each returned company to get industry, employee count, headquarters and revenue band. Rank by similarity, then filter to your target size and region. Because enrichment returns fields such as industries, totalEmployees, locations.headquarters and finances.revenue, you can do that filtering on the API response instead of scraping sites yourself.

H3 Trade-offs to expect

The main risk is that "similar" is the vendor's model, not yours. Treat the score as a ranking hint and re-rank with your own fields. Similarity also tends to cluster around size and industry, so niche or unusual businesses may return weak matches.

Next step: run one seed domain through the similarity call and one through enrichment, then compare whether the returned fields actually support the filter you need before wiring it into a product.

What types of events can I get notified about for companies?

The Companies API mentions event notifications as a capability, but the page evidence supplied here does not list specific event types. The visible material focuses on enrichment (turning a domain into a company profile with 300+ data points) and on "get notified about important events" only at a general level.

What the page does tell you

• The product is built around company enrichment by domain, email or social network URL, plus similar-company search.
• Notifications are positioned as a monitoring layer on top of that company data, not as a separate product.
• Concrete event categories, delivery channels (webhook, email, in-app) and filters are not shown in the evidence, so treat any list of event types as unconfirmed until you check the product's own documentation.

How to find out

Open the API documentation or the dashboard's notification settings on The Companies API and look for a webhook or subscription section. Ask three things:

1. Which triggers exist (for example funding, leadership change, hiring, domain or website status change).
2. How you scope them (a watchlist of domains, an industry, a saved search).
3. How they arrive and how often (real-time webhook vs. digest).

A practical scenario

Say you run a CRM for B2B sales. You enrich each new lead's domain, then subscribe to events for those domains so a rep sees a signal before a call. If the event list is narrow, you would pair it with scheduled re-enrichment and diff the fields yourself; if it is broad, you can rely on the feed and spend your engineering time elsewhere.

Decision criterion

Choose notifications over polling only if the events you care about are covered and delivered promptly enough for your workflow. Otherwise, schedule periodic re-enrichment and compare stored profiles — that approach works with any enrichment source and needs no event support at all.

How can I integrate The Companies API into my product or marketing tool?

You integrate The Companies API by sending it a company identifier your product already has — typically a domain name, email address, or social network URL — and getting back a structured company profile. The page's own example shows a domain turning into a JSON object with fields like name, industries, employee counts, revenue band, headquarters, social links, and logos. So the integration question is really: which of your existing user actions should trigger an enrichment call, and what do you do with the response?

Practical integration patterns

• Form autofill: when a user types their work email or company website during signup, call the API and prefill company name, size, industry, and logo. This cuts friction and improves data quality.
• Lead enrichment in a CRM or marketing tool: enrich new leads automatically, then route or score them by industry, employee band, or revenue band.
• Account-based personalization: use industry, description, and tagline fields to tailor landing pages, onboarding copy, or outbound messaging.
• Similar-company and event features: the product description mentions finding similar businesses and getting notified about important events, which suits prospecting tools and competitive monitoring.
• Internal data hygiene: bulk-enrich or de-duplicate a company database by domain.

Language and scale

The page highlights building features "in your favorite programming language," and reports 40M+ API requests served in 30 days, 50M+ companies, and 300K+ companies scanned in the last 24 hours. For a typical product team that means the API is designed for steady production traffic rather than occasional lookups. A simple architecture is: enrichment call on the server side, cache the result against the domain, and refresh only when you need fresher fields.

What to check before committing

A concrete first step

Take one high-value screen in your product — signup, lead capture, or an account page — and enrich a single field there, such as company logo or employee band. Start with the free credits and a demo to validate match quality on your own data before rolling enrichment into every workflow.