Why we built prospiq
It started with a campaign. 800 contacts, 12% bounce rate, a deliverability hit that took weeks to recover — and an enrichment bill that didn't care.
The campaign went out on a Tuesday.
800 contacts. We'd spent the better part of a week building the list, segmenting by ICP, writing the sequences. The enrichment bill was already paid — credits consumed, addresses delivered, every row in the CSV showing an email. Looked fine on the dashboard.
By Wednesday morning, the bounce rate was 12%. By Thursday, our warmup tool was flagging the sender domain. By Friday, the inbox-placement rate was sitting in spam folders for accounts we'd been emailing successfully for months. The bounces had cost us reputation, not just credits.
We pulled up the enrichment tool's dashboard. Every one of the bounced addresses was marked "found." Some were marked "high confidence." A few were even marked verified — and they still bounced.
That was the moment. Not a strategy session, not a Twitter thread, not a pitch deck. Just a credit balance going down for results that nuked our deliverability.
This post is for people who've had that week, or who are about to.
The pattern we couldn't escape
It wasn't one tool. It was the model.
Most enrichment products charge you for the lookup, not the result. The math is straightforward: a tool that gets paid whether the email works or not has no commercial reason to fix its miss rate. The dashboard says "found." The bill says "paid." The inbox says otherwise. All three statements are simultaneously true, and none of them help.
We watched this happen across three different products over six months. Different brands, different price points, same underlying rule. You pay per attempt. The tool is incentivized to attempt. Whether the attempt produced a usable address is your problem.
After enough campaigns, you stop trusting the green checkmarks.
What we tried first
We didn't start by building anything. We started by trying to make existing tools work.
We ran on Apollo for a stretch. Good database, broad coverage, sequences worked. The per-seat economics caught up with us before the database depth paid off. Every conversation about hiring another rep included a sidebar about whether the tooling math still made sense.
We moved to Lusha for a while, mostly for the phones. Strong on direct dials. The credit model was even more aggressive about charging for unverifiable lookups, and the bounce problem didn't go away.
Hunter we used as a complement to both — domain search, verification, cleanup pass on lists before sending. It's good at what it does, and we still respect it (we partner with them now). But Hunter alone isn't a complete prospecting tool. You can't run a 7-person sales team off domain search.
The combination — Apollo plus Hunter plus a phone tool plus a verification tool — actually worked, technically. Coverage was acceptable. The problem was we were paying for four products to assemble what should have been one product, and three of the four were charging us for results we couldn't use.
That's when the conversation shifted from "which tool" to "what would the right tool look like."
The rule we built around
We wrote down one sentence before we wrote any code. It became the product:
You're never charged for an unverified email, or a phone we can't find.
That sentence drives everything underneath. The verification step is non-negotiable, not an optional upsell. If we can't verify it, we don't bill for it. If we can't find a phone number, the credit goes back. The miss rate is our problem, not yours.
This required structural choices that aren't typical. The enrichment pipeline runs five layers of fallback before declaring a miss — domain intelligence, pattern verification, identity resolution, broader domain search, and partner-source fallback. Each layer is checked before any credit is consumed, and the credit is only consumed if the result actually verifies. If we hit layer five and still come up empty, you don't pay.
Phone enrichment runs a similar waterfall. Datagma as primary, Apollo as fallback. Up to two numbers per reveal. If neither source returns anything, no charge.
It's a slower architecture than "lookup and bill." It costs us margin per query. We think it's the only honest way to charge for a service like this.
Three things we won't do
We made three commitments early that we're going to keep, even when growth pressure suggests otherwise.
We won't sell only to enterprises. A lot of B2B SaaS drifts upmarket because enterprise contracts have higher ACVs and lower churn. We understand the math. The cost is that the bootstrapped founder running her own outbound, the seed-stage team with two SDRs, the agency owner running campaigns for six clients — they get pushed out of the product or priced out of the tier. We built prospiq because those people are us. The free tier (20 credits, no credit card) and the entry plan ($29 a month, 500 credits) exist on purpose.
We won't lock you into annual contracts. Monthly billing, monthly cancel. The yearly plans are a 20% discount, not a contract. If we stop being useful to you, you stop paying us. The runway pressure that creates on us is the right kind of pressure.
We won't charge for bounces. This is the rule above, said again, because it's the one most likely to drift if we're not vigilant. Every quarter we'll re-examine whether the verification standard is holding. If a category of emails is slipping through marked "verified" but bouncing in production, we treat that as a product bug, not a pricing rounding error.
What we don't have yet
To stay honest: there are real gaps.
Our integration list is shorter than the incumbents. HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, plus Zapier and Google Sheets — that's the launch surface. If you depend on a specific tool we don't connect to yet, that's a real friction point and we won't pretend otherwise.
We don't have AI-generated outreach copy. We don't have buying intent signals. We don't have account scoring. Some of those are on the roadmap, some aren't — we'd rather do enrichment exceptionally well than do six adjacent things passably.
We don't have a years-long track record. We launched in May 2026. The product is solid, the architecture is verified in production, the data quality is real — but we don't have ten years of customer case studies because we haven't existed for ten years. If you're risk-averse about new vendors, that's a fair concern.
The closest comparison post we've published is our honest comparison with Apollo. It covers the gaps in more detail and is probably the right read if you're trying to decide between us and the more established option.
Who we want to serve
The customer we built this for is specific. Bootstrapped or seed-stage. Running their own outbound, or managing a small team that does. Not interested in a 47-feature platform — interested in clean data, fair pricing, and getting back to selling. Cares about whether the email actually works, not the dashboard the tool ships with.
If that's you, we'd like a shot at being your enrichment layer. The free tier is there for exactly this — try it on a real list, watch how it behaves, decide whether the rule we built around (charge only on success) actually shows up in your invoice.
If it doesn't, you've spent nothing. If it does, you're in.
That's the homepage when you're ready.
Try prospiq free — 20 credits, no credit card.