Five free tools to find email addresses of people, but only two worth seriously considering
Providers of email-finding software have evolved significantly (as at 2025) since I last wrote an article on this topic five years ago, with previously dominant players finding themselves being pushed out.
Here I focus on five tools that will help you find email addresses of people from businesses either totally for free or with a free option and upsell.
I have deliberately left out the bigger players (Zoominfo, Cognism, etc), and have focused on what you’re probably most interested in:
A way to find email addresses for free.
I do expand a bit on the additional services provided by some of these companies, purely because the ‘free’ part of what they offer is part of a bigger picture, including their upsells.
None of these pay me for my views, and they are ordered from top (best options for free emails, in my view) to bottom.
At the end I provide an insight into where I believe things are heading with the provision of free email addresses information.
If you want to jump quickly to a tool, just click on the links below.
Free.
Finding email addresses of people when viewing their LinkedIn profile.
Although you need to sign up for an Apollo account, it’s free (unless you choose to upgrade to the paid tiers at some point) and you can access 10,000 emails per month:
However, be aware that you only get those 10,000 emails if you are using a corporate email address (e.g. abc.com). If you use a non-corporate email address to sign up (e.g. gmail) then you are limited to 100 emails per month. I’m assuming that most reading this would have a proper business email account.
Although you can find email addresses within the Apollo interface, free users activate their LinkedIn extension, which makes it easy to access the email addresses (where identifiable) from LinkedIn profile pages.
This only needs a basic LinkedIn account, not the paid versions.
You simply click on the extension button to access the email and if it’s available then you can copy/paste it.
Apollo are smart and seem to be targeting the hole left in the market by the bigger players (Hubspot etc.), who smaller businesses won’t pay for.
I initially signed up for Apollo because I wanted the free access to emails but I engaged with their emails showing how much more the Apollo system can do, ultimately subscribing to the paid version (starts from $59 per month, no long-term commitment).
That paid version makes it easy to build up lists of prospects (by industry, job role etc.) from their database of 210 million people, and create email sequences to people.
I did discover a limitation though – although they allow 10,000 emails to be accessed per month, they only allow you to export 1,680 per month, as you can see below:
So if you were thinking about using the paid version to mass export contacts to put into another system, then you’d have to resort to the various external services that scrape that data from your Apollo view (with prices typically around $4 per 1,000 contacts extracted).
Free.
Manually finding email addresses for named people at companies that have websites.
The free email finder tool from Emailchaser doesn’t require any sign up and can be accessed at:
https://www.emailchaser.com/email-finder
It’s a fairly manual process that involves you entering the name of the person and their website url, but the results are good (although can take a few seconds to bring up each one).
In one of their videos they explain how they research valid email addresses and come up with better matches than many of their competitors, which I found to be true when I tested the same contacts on a range of the free email finding tools available.
Their broader Emailchaser software solution (their professional plan – priced at $97 per month) focuses more on their sales CRM and ability to create cold email sequences.
I’d be surprised if their email finder tool will be free to access forever without login, and I suspect that over time they will realise that people would be happy to sign up to get access to that, which gives them the opportunity to upsell their core services.
Free (limited to 25 searches per month).
Finding multiple emails from websites that you’re visiting.
Identifying patterns of email recipients so that you can guess the email addresses of other people at those businesses.
You need to sign up for a free Hunter account at:
You then need to download your browser extension and can choose from Chrome, Firefox, Edge here:
When viewing a website you can click on the extension and it’ll show you email addresses found that are related to that website domain:
You also have the option to see sources of where Hunter found the email addresses:
Although very limited in the number of free searches you get each month, Hunter can be useful when it shows you the structure of emails related to that website. That allows you to guess at email addresses of other people in the business (that you can’t find emails for).
Although mainly used for finding and verifying emails, Hunter can also be used for creating email campaigns, but isn’t as extensive as other systems.
Beyond the free 25 emails per month, Hunter has packages starting from $49 per month (30% lower if paying annually), which increase the numbers of emails accessible (to 500 per month, with optional add-ons of $10 per 100 credits).
My view is that years ago I would have recommended Hunter because there was little competition around, but with (free and low priced) options like Apollo available, Hunter will find it hard to compete nowadays.
Free (limited to 50 emails per month).
Finding multiple emails from a website domain.
You can use the Snov.io email finder for free without an account:
Identifying email addresses is just part of what the Snov.io software offers and, like so many others, it has paid versions that focus on cold email campaigns and CRM, enabling more to be gained from identifying emails of people. Those start from $39 per month and give 1,000 email finding credits plus all the other benefits.
Seems to be designed for businesses that like the idea of cold emailing campaigns but who want to start at a low cost.
Free (limited to 70 credits per month).
Not sure – couldn’t get it to work!
In theory, a browser extension that lets you see emails (each of the 70 free credits in Lusha will give you an email) when on LinkedIn or company websites.
After a bit of time trying to get it to work, looking at cookies etc. I got no further than a message of:
plugin.lusha.com refused to connect
If I was looking for a software tool to find email addresses for free, I’d quickly be looking for other options, many of which I’ve already covered on this page.
I didn’t go deep into this but logged into Lusha, it looks very similar to Apollo and allows filtering of millions of contact records. The pricing though is very different to Apollo – $20 per month gets only 200 credits and for $70 only 800 credits, which is way lower than the 10,000 emails Apollo would provide for similar pricing. I did get the impression though that a ‘credit’ gives more than just an email address (more information about the company).
This didn’t keep my attention long enough to discover whether there was something better Lusha offered, and, for me, they failed at the initial hurdle of not being able to provide free email addresses via any sort of finder tool that worked.
Email finding tools are part of a much bigger picture of marketing to people who are seen as likely to have intent to buy.
Some would say that using data from free email finding services is primitive compared to the more advanced systems that are available, which is a fair point.
In my view, the vast majority of companies are not going to be paying out for the likes of Hubspot, Cognism, Zoominfo, and others that are all competing for budget share of those companies that are prepared to pay for all those bells and whistles.
It’s always been the same: the biggest market in the world are those micro to small-sized companies that want to be gaining more business but don’t necessarily have the budget, time, or resources to spend more.
They are the lowest potential revenue per company but are also the biggest potential overall gain because of the huge number of businesses that fit within micro to small-sized companies.
I’m fairly confident that those software tool suppliers that offer a minimal amount of free email addresses per month are going to lose prospects to those who offer a lot more.
People like Apollo currently (as at 2025) provide a lot for free and they know that they will convert some of those free customers to paying subscribers. That’s no different to what Hubspot did for years and, although Apollo are currently affordable if choosing to go beyond their free offering, only time will tell if they decide to move up the food chain and try and eat into the market of people like Hubspot.
If they do, then their pricing will change and make them unaffordable. They could even take away the free access to email addresses, although if they do then there will be others waiting in the wings to capitalise on the need for that service.
For now, Apollo are doing the right thing: capturing people via the generous free email addresses, while nurturing those who may want to buy into more.
If I had a crystal ball, I’d predict that the Apollo approach will shift further (whether by them or others) in this way …
That conflicts heavily with what businesses think they should be doing, which is:
The latter is seen as more efficient but the former (the more hand-holding, human-intensive process) is fully customised to the requirements of the prospect client who just wants an easy life – and to see proof that results can be achieved (before committing to pay for more).
I’ve yet to see this hand-holding model come to life but the providers that do this will be those that do well if they get ‘prove before you buy’ working for their prospects.