Ultimate Guide To All 21 Proxycurl APIs: Enrich People & Company Profiles

Steven Goh | CEO -

At Proxycurl, we pride ourselves with the many data enrichment APIs that we offer to our clients to power their applications. Not just the sheer number of it, but the quality of these APIs, in 8 in-depth features which will be covered in this post.

If you heard about us or stumbled upon us for the first time and are curious to find out more, this post will let you know all you need to know and more. Of course, we strive to convince you why our data scraping APIs are the best for your company. At the end of this, we will tell you how you can try out our APIs immediately to see for yourself, which you can straight away do a people search or company search relevant to your company.

However if you are not new here, you are already our beloved existing user or client, this post can serve as a reference of all we can offer you, or to answer some questions that you have regarding our products.

Content

21 APIs That Scrape Profiles Of People, Company, Contact, Jobs

We have various APIs that draw primarily from LinkedIn and some other sources, and return all kinds of data - including the all-valuable contact information (email addresses, phone numbers), and company data such as funding & acquisition information. Either way, here is the full list of our API products and brief notes on what you can use them for, to get profile information and more.

Please find here for our API Documentation for further reference and API examples, including the actual python code samples and results. The following is a brief overview of all our 21 APIs.

People Profile APIs

Company Profile APIs

Contact APIs - Emails & Contact Numbers

Job Profile APIs

School Profile APIs & More

There you go, all our 21 APIs. On their own, some are already very popularly used as they return tons of data points, like the People Profile API and Company Profile API. With the other APIs, they can be used together on top of each other - think of them like Lego blocks - to return some more complex results, according to your application and business needs.

8 In-Depth Features of Our Data Enrichment APIs

Comprehensive & Well-Built APIs to Support Your Applications and Growth

1. Freshness Of API Data

Freshness is an important metric of any data, after all who will want to work based on stale and outdated data? …or won’t they? Well, this is where at Proxycurl we give both parties the flexibility and freedom to choose the freshness of data they want from our API requests, specifically these two parameters:

• Profile data <= 29 days old

Even though the parameter is capped at 29 days old, and to some this might still be considered stale data, but on average 88% of the data is fetched in real time whilst the other 12% are cached profiles that we stored as they are frequently queried and popular profiles data. Thus in reality, the data and profile information you get could be much fresher than 29 days old, but definitely not exceeding it.

Because the API is scraping live while using this parameter, it might take 2-3 seconds to complete, not immediately.

• Profile data with no freshness guarantee

This parameter will fetch cached profiles from our LinkDB LinkedIn dataset, which contains more than 401M+ people and company profiles. If the requested profiles do not exist, the APIs will fetch them live. That said, Proxycurl LinkDB dataset is updated very regularly, as often as when there is an API request to scrape a particular profile, that profile will be updated in LinkDB. This keeps LinkDB freshly updated to up to millions of profiles daily. Thus in reality, while using this parameter does not guarantee freshness, the data and profile information returned will still have a high degree of freshness.

For the response time of this parameter, it returns data almost immediately. This is good if you need fast and immediate responses for your UI applications.

2. Huge Amount Of Data Points

Proxycurl APIs return a huge and comprehensive amount of data points, especially for the popular Person Profile API and Company Profile API, including the valuable contact information, skills data, companies funding and acquisition data, employees profile information and more. Here is the exhaustive list of data points returned for both of these APIs. Check out our API documentation for the full coverage.

• People Profile API

first and last name, profile picture, personal phone numbers, personal emails, work emails, occupation, work industry, Github, Facebook & Twitter profiles ID, LinkedIn profile headline & summary, country, city & state, work experience, education, languages, organizations, publications, honors & awards, patents, courses completed, projects, test scores, volunteer work, certifications, connections, activities, articles, groups, skills, inferred salary, gender, birth date, interests, related LinkedIn profiles, LinkedIn recommendations, profile follower count, similarly-name LinkedIn profiles, etc.

A whooping 45 data points on a person alone.

• Company Profile API

company name, description, website, tagline, profile picture, industry, categories, size, HQ & other locations (including country, city, state, street and postal code), company email, company phone number, Facebook & Twitter ID, company type, founded year & date, specialities, stock symbol, IPO status, Crunchbase rank, acquisitions & exits, funding rounds, funding amount, investors count, company LinkedIn updates, LinkedIn profile follower count, similar companies, etc.

A whooping 45 data points on one company alone.

There are many more with our other APIs - check out our full documentation for the rest of them. We scrape these data points from various sources - LinkedIn being a major source of course. We also work with external partners for data points that aren’t available on public profiles like skills data to enrich the profiles you need.

3. Rate Limit

Our rate limit is generally sufficient for each client. Mostly our users are not restricted by our rate limit, but rather the budget available to query huge amounts of API requests. Every account has a rate limit of 300 requests per minute, which equates to 432,000 API requests per day, or $4,320 budget per day minimally ($0.01/credit for each API request). This is a rate we employ based on the usage load of our clients, to ensure that each client is able to query API requests when they need and we are able to support it.
If the pre-set rate limit is still not enough for you, you can consider the Enterprise plan where we can customize the rate limit for your use case. Or for regular accounts, you can use the use_cache=if-present parameter to read data from cache and these requests will not be rate limited.

This is arguably a critically important consideration (if not the most important) of any data sourcing efforts you embark on. Why? Because any misstep in the compliance of handling data will land you in hot trouble, potentially even crippling your company.
Personal data handling has become an increasingly important issue globally. At Proxycurl we make sure we, and of course our clients are fully-compliant with the major legal compliance standards - being CCPA and GDPR compliant, and in the process of being SOC 2 certified. We abide by the strict standards laid out by these regulations, have rigorous policies in place to safeguard users’ data and help you abide by these legal compliance too. So that you can focus on scaling your business, and let us worry about your data needs.

5. Size of Dataset

Majority of our APIs plumber for data from any country in the world, including our clients’ favorite APIs - People Profile API & Company Profile API that enrich profiles of people and companies. For some APIs, they are “limited” to certain countries including the US, Canada, UK, Singapore and many more. These APIs are powered by our LinkDB dataset, although restrictive, there are still a whooping more than 401 million people and companies profiles available globally. This size of dataset, I guarantee you, will give your company the necessary kickstart immediately, especially in lead generation, and allow you to scale up quicker than if without it.

6. API Success Rate & Accuracy

Data accuracy is one of the harder metrics to nail, yet a huge differentiating factor if done well. One major factor to this issue is the platform itself from which we scrape the data - for example LinkedIn - any changes to LinkedIn’s structure or data fields and we will need to adapt and keep up to them to ensure our APIs continue to work. And, if a particular profile doesn’t exist, or not accessible, then our APIs will return error, or return a closest-match profile.
A data type where accuracy is particularly important is the contact info, that is the whole purpose of getting contact information - to be able to actually contact the leads. Take an example, Proxycurl Work Email Lookup API has a match rate of more than 45% or 1 in 2 persons, whereas some other vendors might only have a low 13%, or in other words, only 1-2 out of 10 people are contactable from the emails returned by these vendors. Of these 45% of emails, Proxycurl guarantees a deliverability rate of a high 95%.

7. Data From LinkedIn Public Profiles - Not Private

Many of our clients look for LinkedIn data given its wealth of data on people and companies there. On LinkedIn we only scrape for public profiles and not private profiles, as a results we don’t have some information directly from LinkedIn that are privy to private profiles such as skills, contact information, social media profiles etc. These “missing” data however we plumber for them via other channels, or in some cases we work with external parties.
It is difficult enough to scrape data from LinkedIn public profiles, to scrape private profiles is not just a mammoth task but a highly risky one, as you could land yourself in legal trouble with the Goliath which is LinkedIn. There’s a reason why they are "private" profiles, they are meant to stay private, and reserved only for other LinkedIn members who are connected to these profiles. Scraping illegally or erroneously for LinkedIn private profiles would mean eating into their money-making pie, and they definitely wouldn’t sit idly by.

8. Pricing Model: Flexible & Scalable

Our pricing at Proxycurl offers tons of flexibility, all implemented from the feedback of our clients. The 2 pricing structures are: monthly subscription plans and pay-as-you-go model, based on credit purchase. If you are a regular user with consistent use of a certain volume of API calls, the monthly plans would give the highest value and predictable costs every month, from as low as $0.009/credit to $0.020/credit. If you are not a heavy user, or going for just a one-off usage, our pay-as-you-go plans give you the utmost flexibility depending purely on your usage, from as low as $0.018/credit or just $10 for the lowest purchase.

If you require really large volume monthly, we have an enterprise plan that offers volume discount with minimum commitment of 18 months with a contract. It starts from $2,000/month and the credits expire every month. This is ideal for companies that require huge amount of data and API requests regularly, it would give you the best value, and butler-like service from us.

Get Started With Proxycurl APIs Today

That’s 8 in-depth features of our APIs for you. As powerful as they already are, you can pair up our other product - LinkDB to get even more for your business or applications. LinkDB is our exhaustive dataset of people and companies profiles with more than 401 million profiles for your use. Combining both products, for example, you can surface leads or profiles immediately from LinkDB, and then using our APIs you can enrich these profiles with structured data like contact info, work experience, etc.

There are definitely many more nuances to share with you about our APIs. Feel free to contact us or email us to chat more. If you are interested in moving forward, you can try out our APIs immediately. We offer our APIs for trial in Postman, which you can use just by creating a free account. It comes with 10 free credits too. Go through this step-by-step tutorial on trying out our APIs on Postman.

We look forward to seeing you and talking to you. Meanwhile, check out our other resources and posts too!

Get free credits to try immediately.