Lima Data Review

Lima Data sells itself as a real-time data layer rather than a static contact database: verified work emails, mobile numbers, company firmographics, and live signal webhooks, all metered by credits and exposed through more than 50 API endpoints. It's built to serve two different buyers at once — sales and recruiting teams who want a self-serve prospecting tool, and developers or AI agent builders who want to bolt contact data onto their own product. This review covers what's verifiably on offer, what the credit math actually costs, and where the evidence runs out.

Verdict at a glance

What kind of tool is Lima Data?

Lima Data is a contact and company data provider that bills itself on freshness: records are pulled and refreshed in real time rather than served from a stale, periodically-scraped database. The core data types are verified work emails, mobile numbers, person/company enrichment, and job postings, plus a signals layer that pushes webhook alerts for job changes, promotions, funding events, and hiring activity. A separate AI search and extraction API lets a caller turn arbitrary web pages into structured JSON. The whole product is metered in credits rather than seats, and the vendor is explicit that the target use case includes AI agents consuming the API directly, not just humans using a dashboard.

How it works

Access is self-serve: sign up, land on the free tier (100 credits), and start calling endpoints or using the UI to build prospect lists. Each action has a published credit cost — a person or company enrichment call and a work-email lookup each cost 1 credit, web search and web extraction cost 0.1 credit, and a mobile phone number costs 10 credits. That 10-credit weighting matters more than any other number on the pricing page, because it's the one place the sticker price and the real price diverge sharply.

There's no setup wait analogous to inbox provisioning — this is API infrastructure, not mailbox infrastructure, so the entire onboarding is account creation plus grabbing an API key. Paid plans add overage credits at 150% of the plan's base rate once the included allotment runs out.

Lima Data pricing (2026)

The math worth doing before you buy: because a mobile number costs 10 credits, the vendor's own "up to 250 numbers" figure on Starter is just 2,500 credits divided by 10 — meaning a team that mostly wants phone numbers, not emails, burns through a $50/month plan on 250 records. That's roughly $0.20 per verified mobile number at list price, or $0.30 per number once you hit overage pricing (150% of $0.02). Pro cuts that to roughly $0.10 and $0.15 per number respectively. If your use case is email-heavy, the plans look generous; if it's phone-heavy, budget for roughly 10x the credit spend the headline numbers imply.

What we could and couldn't verify

We verified current plan structure, credit pricing, and per-endpoint credit costs directly from Lima Data's live site. We could not find any independent third-party reviews — no G2, Trustpilot, or Capterra listing turned up, and no Reddit or community discussion of the product surfaced either. That means the vendor's core claims — real-time freshness, verified-email accuracy, mobile number hit rates — are unconfirmed by any outside source at the time of writing. This is a newer or lower-profile entrant in a category (Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clay, Cognism) where competitors carry thousands of published reviews, so treat data-quality claims as unverified until you've tested a sample yourself, which the free tier is well-suited for.

Pros and cons

Pros

• Transparent, published per-credit pricing with overage rates listed up front — no "contact sales" wall for the base tiers
• Broad single API surface: people, company, job postings, and real-time signal webhooks in one account
• Free tier (100 credits) lets you sample data quality before spending anything
• Built with API-first and AI-agent use cases in mind, not just a human dashboard bolted onto old data

Cons

• No independent reviews found anywhere — no outside validation of accuracy or freshness claims
• Mobile phone credits cost 10x an email credit, which can make phone-heavy workflows far more expensive than the headline price suggests
• Batch endpoints and custom rate limits are Enterprise-only, gating bulk workflows behind a custom quote
• As a newer entrant, there's no visible long-run track record to compare against established data vendors

Lima Data alternatives

• Apollo — combined data platform and sequencer with a large free tier and a long-established review base.
• Clay — enrichment and workflow builder that waterfalls multiple data providers together rather than serving as a single source.
• Ocean.io — company- and signal-focused prospecting with a similar precision-filtering pitch.
• ZoomInfo — category incumbent; higher price, but backed by an extensive public review and compliance history.
• Cognism — compliance-oriented contact data (GDPR/CCPA) with strong EU mobile number coverage.

Who should use Lima Data — and who shouldn't

Good fit: developers and AI agent builders who want a single API for people, company, and signal data and are comfortable evaluating a newer vendor on their own testing rather than a review history; sales or recruiting teams whose prospecting is mostly email-based, where the credit math is favorable.

Poor fit: teams that need phone-heavy prospecting at low cost, since mobile credits run 10x the email rate; buyers who need a vetted, widely-reviewed vendor before committing budget; teams that need bulk batch exports without negotiating an Enterprise contract.