# Hunter.io > Find professional email addresses associated with any domain. Verify deliverability before sending. Used by journalists for source outreach. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/hunter **Official site:** https://hunter.io **Category:** newsgathering ## Security rating - **Rating:** adequate - **Rating note (required when citing):** EU-hosted (Belgium) with GDPR compliance and Standard Contractual Clauses for international transfers. Hunter indexes only publicly available professional email data — not scraped from private databases. Encryption in transit confirmed. Search history is logged and retained, which matters if you're researching sensitive targets. The platform is a data aggregator by design, so it inherently involves collecting and storing personal information (professional emails). Adequate for standard journalism outreach; not appropriate for high-risk investigations where your search activity itself could be compromising. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — not an independent security audit - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-11 > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Journalists doing source outreach who need to find the right person's email at an organization. Investigative reporters tracing professional connections. Freelancers pitching editors. Anyone who needs verified contact information beyond what's on a company's website. ## Editorial take Hunter indexes publicly available professional email addresses from 81 million websites and lets you search by domain, name, or company. The free tier gives you 50 credits per month — enough for occasional source outreach but not sustained investigation. The real utility for journalists is Domain Search (enter a company domain, get a list of employees and their email patterns) and Email Verifier (confirm an address is deliverable before you send). Founded in 2015 by Antoine Finkelstein and Francois Grante, Hunter has 6 million users and a Chrome extension with 600,000+ installs. The data comes from publicly crawled web pages — not hacked databases or purchased lists — which keeps it on the right side of GDPR. Servers are in Belgium. The main alternative is Clearbit (now part of HubSpot), which is enterprise-priced and overkill for journalists. Snov.io and Voila Norbert do similar things at similar prices. Hunter's advantage is simplicity: it does one thing well and the free tier actually works. The limitation: it only finds professional emails that have appeared publicly. If someone has never had their work email on a webpage, Hunter won't find them. For journalists, this is a targeted outreach tool — not a surveillance tool. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** Finding professional email addresses for source outreach. Verifying email deliverability before sending cold pitches. Identifying the email pattern at an organization (e.g., firstname.lastname@company.com). Reporters reaching out to specific people at companies, NGOs, or government agencies. **Not for:** Finding personal email addresses or phone numbers. Investigating subjects who keep low public profiles. Bulk email marketing (Hunter has sending limits and is not a mass mailer). Journalists in high-risk environments who need to avoid leaving digital traces — Hunter logs your searches. ## Pricing - **Pricing:** Free: 50 credits/month (25 domain searches, 50 email verifications). Starter: $34/month (annual) for 2,000 credits. Growth: $104/month (annual) for 10,000 credits. Scale: $209/month (annual) for 25,000 credits. Enterprise: custom. - **Free option:** yes ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** unknown - **Data jurisdiction:** Belgium (EU). Hunter servers are located in Belgium. International transfers use Standard Contractual Clauses. Hunter maintains EU and UK representatives for GDPR compliance. **Privacy policy TL;DR:** Hunter collects account data (name, email, billing), usage data (feature interactions, retained 3 months), and visitor data (IP, geolocation, retained 14 months). Profile data — the professional emails Hunter indexes — comes from publicly crawled web pages and is retained until removed from public sources or deletion is requested. Campaign data (if you use Hunter's email sequences) is private to you and retained until account deletion. Sub-processors listed at hunter.io/subprocessors. GDPR compliant as both controller and processor. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** Hunter logs your search queries — if you're investigating a sensitive target, be aware that your interest in that domain is recorded in Hunter's systems. Use the free tier without connecting your real email if you want minimal exposure. Don't use Hunter's email sequence feature for source outreach — send from your own email client so Hunter doesn't store the conversation. Verify email addresses before sending to avoid bounces that could alert a target's IT team. Remember that Hunter only surfaces publicly available data — it's not a substitute for deeper OSINT when you need unlisted contacts. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** Hunter.io (distributed company, founded in France). Co-founders Antoine Finkelstein and Francois Grante. CEO: Matthew Tharp. Team of approximately 25-30 people across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. - **Funding model:** Bootstrapped. No publicly disclosed venture funding rounds. - **Business model:** Freemium SaaS. Revenue from paid subscriptions (Starter through Enterprise). Free tier serves as lead generation for paid plans. API access available on all tiers for integrations. **Known issues:** Hunter's data accuracy depends on how recently web pages were crawled — some email addresses may be outdated if someone has left an organization. The free tier's 50-credit monthly limit is tight for any sustained research. Hunter's own marketing emphasizes cold email outreach, which has reputational associations with spam — journalists should be aware that recipients may view Hunter-facilitated outreach skeptically. Some email addresses surfaced by Hunter come from data breach compilations that ended up on public paste sites, though Hunter states it only indexes web pages. --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/hunter Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology