THE PROXYCURL ALTERNATIVE

Proxycurl Is Gone. Your Pipeline Doesn't Have to Be.

Datamagnet works the way Proxycurl did — LinkedIn URL in, structured JSON out — but fetches every profile live at request time. Same integration shape, fresher data. Porting the enrichment calls is a day of work, not a project.

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Datamagnet
Proxycurl
Still operating
Data freshness
Live at request
Live or cached ≤29 days
Post & engagement data
Job-change & engagement signals
6 types
Email & phone lookup
Proxycurl shut down its API
4 Jul 2025Proxycurl shut down its API
Per live Datamagnet profile
1 creditPer live Datamagnet profile
Credits, no card required
10 freeCredits, no card required

Datamagnet vs Proxycurl: the short answer

Proxycurl is gone. LinkedIn sued its parent company Nubela in January 2025, and Proxycurl shut its API down on 4 July 2025 to comply with the settlement; the court entered a permanent injunction later that month. If you used Proxycurl to enrich people and companies from a LinkedIn URL, Datamagnet is the closest replacement: the same URL-in, JSON-out model, but every profile fetched live at request time for 1 credit. If you leaned on Proxycurl's Contact API for emails and phone numbers, or its job-postings endpoints, Datamagnet does not cover those and you will need a second vendor.

Our verdict

There is nothing left to weigh up: Proxycurl cannot be bought and its API no longer returns data. The real question is what replaces it, and the answer depends on which half of Proxycurl you used. For person and company enrichment from a LinkedIn URL, Datamagnet maps almost one-for-one and improves on it — a live fetch on every call rather than a record that could be up to 29 days old, plus post engagement and job-change signals Proxycurl never offered. For the Contact API, job listings, school rosters and the IP Reveal endpoint, we are not the answer at all. Most teams migrating off Proxycurl end up buying two products where they used to buy one.

Which one should you pick?

Straight guidance, including the cases where we're the wrong answer.

Choose Datamagnet if

  • Your Proxycurl integration was person and company enrichment from a LinkedIn URL — that maps almost one-for-one
  • You want the profile as it is at this moment rather than a cached record that may be up to 29 days old
  • You need post content and the identities behind engagement — commenters, reactors and reposters — which Proxycurl never returned
  • You would rather watch for job changes with signals and webhooks than sweep every stored record on a timer
  • You want a Sales Navigator search URL turned into structured results — Proxycurl had person and company search, but no Sales Navigator path
  • You want to start self-serve today on credits, with no seats and no annual contract

Choose Proxycurl if

  • You need work emails, personal emails or phone numbers — Proxycurl's Contact API did that and Datamagnet does no email or phone lookup at all
  • You need job-postings data. Proxycurl had Job Profile, Job Listing and Job Listing Count endpoints; Datamagnet has no job-postings product
  • You need to resolve an IPv4 address to a company for website visitor identification, which the Proxycurl Reveal endpoint did and we do not
  • You need school profiles and student rosters for campus recruiting, which have no Datamagnet equivalent
  • You want to query hundreds of millions of stored profiles in bulk the way LinkDB was sold — every Datamagnet call fetches one record at a time
  • You want a single vendor covering the whole Proxycurl surface. No replacement does; plan to split enrichment and contact data

Datamagnet vs Proxycurl, feature by feature

What each tool actually returns, how fresh it is, and what it costs to run.

Data & API coverage

Data & API coverage: Datamagnet compared with Proxycurl, feature by feature
FeatureDatamagnetProxycurl
Still operating YesShut down 4 July 2025
Person profile enrichment1 credit · fetched liveYes — LinkDB + live mix
Company profile enrichment1 credit · fetched liveYes — LinkDB + live mix
Data collected at the moment of requestEvery endpoint, by defaultCaller-selected: live or cached
Live people search (25 results/page) YesPerson Search API
Instant search over previously enriched profiles50 results/pageLinkDB, ~473M profiles
Sales Navigator URL search Yes No
ICP search with include/exclude logic YesPerson & Company Search API
Post content & stats Yes No
Post engagement identities (commenters, reactors, reposters)All three No
Funding rounds data5 credits, accepts a domain Yes
Job-change & engagement signals with HMAC-signed webhooks6 signal types No
Work & personal email lookup No Yes
Personal phone-number lookup No Yes
Job postings data No Yes

Freshness

Freshness: Datamagnet compared with Proxycurl, feature by feature
FeatureDatamagnetProxycurl
Update modelFetched live per requestCaller chose live-with-cache or cache-first
Cache windowNone — no stored copy is served in place of a fetchUp to 29 days, or uncapped on LinkDB
Share of requests served liveEvery request~88%, on its ≤29-day setting
Job-change detectionContinuous signals, pushed by webhookRe-query on your own schedule

Proxycurl capabilities are summarized from their public documentation and pricing pages, last checked July 2026. Products change — verify against their current offering before you buy.

How the data is obtained is now part of the buying decision

Proxycurl did not fail on product quality. It failed because roughly half its revenue came from scraping the professional network, by its founder's own account — which is why he called the legal risk existential. LinkedIn's complaint stacked six claims, among them breach of contract, fraud and deceit and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the case ended in a permanent injunction. How a vendor obtains its data is now the first question a former Proxycurl customer should ask, before writing any migration code. Datamagnet collects only publicly available information, respects robots.txt, and is CCPA and GDPR compliant. The migration itself is small — three changes and a field mapper.

  • Swap the request — POST a JSON body to api.datamagnet.co instead of GET with query params; auth stays Bearer-token
  • Map the fields — responses arrive wrapped in a message object, and some field names differ; remap once in your ingestion layer
  • Re-enrich on your schedule — no bulk re-scrape, and a job_change signal refreshes only the records that actually moved
~50%
Share of Proxycurl's revenue that came from professional-network scraping, by its founder's own account — the reason he called the legal risk existential.

Pricing, side by side

What you pay Proxycurl versus what you pay us, for the same work.

Proxycurl (discontinued)

Not purchasable at any price. The API shut down on 4 July 2025 and the pricing pages are offline. The same founding team now sells NinjaPear, which does not touch LinkedIn data.

Proxycurl APIShut down 4 July 2025
Unavailable
LinkDB bulk accessData obtained by unauthorized means ordered deleted
Unavailable
NinjaPear (successor)3-day trial, 10 credits — no LinkedIn data
Pay-as-you-go

Datamagnet

Credits, not seats. Charged only on successful requests, and 10 free credits to test before you pay anything.

FreeOn signup, no card
10 credits
Starter1,000 credits/mo
$39/mo
Pro10,000 credits/mo
$99/mo
Scale25,000 credits/mo · webhooks + bulk export
$199/mo
Pay-as-you-go200 credits $10 → 100,000 credits $2,000
from $0.02/credit

Proxycurl's own pricing pages now return 404, so there is no verifiable figure to compare against. Datamagnet charges credits only on successful requests. Competitor pricing is taken from their public pricing page and was last checked July 2026; list prices change and negotiated rates differ. See Datamagnet pricing for our current plans.

Where each tool genuinely wins

No tool wins everywhere. Here's the honest split.

Where Proxycurl wins

  • Work-email, personal-email and phone-number lookup through its Contact API — Datamagnet does none of that, and it is the hardest gap for a migrating team to fill
  • Job Profile, Job Listing and Job Listing Count endpoints; Datamagnet has no job-postings product of any kind
  • A Reveal endpoint that resolved an IPv4 address to a company, which is website visitor identification we do not offer
  • School Profile and Student Listing endpoints for campus recruiting, with no Datamagnet equivalent
  • LinkDB — a stored dataset its final pricing page put at 472,880,151 public LinkedIn profiles, queryable in bulk at a scale our per-request model does not reach
  • Person Lookup and Role Lookup, which found someone from a name and company, or a decision-maker from a role, without needing the LinkedIn URL first
  • Employee Listing and Employee Count endpoints that enumerated a company's past and present staff from one company record

Where Datamagnet wins

  • Still operating and open to new customers, which Proxycurl has not been since July 2025
  • Every profile fetched at request time rather than served from a cache up to 29 days old
  • Post content plus commenters, reactors and reposters as structured data — Proxycurl had no posts API
  • Sales Navigator search URLs converted directly into structured results
  • Six job-change and engagement signal types delivered by HMAC-signed webhook
  • Only publicly available information, collected in line with robots.txt, CCPA and GDPR
  • Charged only on successful requests, with 10 free credits and no card to start
  • Flat per-endpoint credit costs — a person or company profile is 1 credit — with no seats and no annual contract

Datamagnet vs Proxycurl: FAQ

LinkedIn filed a federal lawsuit in January 2025 against Nubela Pte. Ltd., Proxycurl LLC and two individuals, alleging unauthorized data collection, fraud and trademark misuse. Proxycurl announced its shutdown on 4 July 2025 to comply with the settlement, and on 28 July LinkedIn said the court had entered a permanent injunction requiring Proxycurl to delete LinkedIn data obtained by unauthorized means. Its founder now says old docs and code samples are historical reference only.

The model is the same: pass a LinkedIn profile or company URL, get structured JSON back. Three things change in migration: requests are POST with a JSON body instead of GET with query params, responses are wrapped in a message object, and some field names differ. Porting person and company enrichment is usually a day of work, not a project. The Contact, jobs and school endpoints have no Datamagnet equivalent.

No. Datamagnet returns person and company profile data, post content, engagement and search results — it does not find work emails, personal emails or phone numbers, and it does no email verification. Proxycurl's Contact API covered exactly that, so teams whose Proxycurl spend was mostly contact lookups need a dedicated contact-data provider alongside Datamagnet rather than instead of it. Enrichment and contact data are two purchases now.

Datamagnet fetches the public page live at the moment of your request rather than serving records from a pre-scraped database, so you get the profile as it exists right now and are charged only on success. We collect only publicly available information, respect robots.txt, and are CCPA and GDPR compliant. Proxycurl let callers pick freshness: its capped setting reported about 88% of data fetched live and 12% cached at up to 29 days, while a second setting served LinkDB records with no guarantee.

Proxycurl's pricing pages are offline and the service cannot be bought at any price, so there is no live comparison to make. Datamagnet is pay-as-you-go with per-endpoint credit costs: 1 credit for a person or company profile, 10 for activity, posts or a search page, 5 for funding rounds. Plans run $39, $99 and $199 a month, or from $0.02 per credit, with no seats and no annual contract. Ten free credits let you test the response shape first.

No bulk re-scrape is needed. Because Datamagnet fetches profiles live per request, you can re-enrich records on your own schedule instead of rebuilding a database up front. A job_change signal is usually the cheaper path: rather than sweeping every stored record on a timer, you watch your list and re-enrich only the profiles that actually moved, which keeps credit spend proportional to real change.

Sources

Every competitor claim on this page traces back to one of these.

  1. 1.Nubela — "Proxycurl Shuts Down. Thank you." (shutdown announcement, 4 July 2025) — checked July 2026
  2. 2.Nubela — "What Is Proxycurl API Now in 2026? I'm the founder." (shut down; ~50% of revenue from professional-network scraping; NinjaPear does not offer LinkedIn data) — checked July 2026
  3. 3.Nubela — Guide to all 21 Proxycurl APIs (endpoint list incl. Contact, Jobs, School, Reveal, Person/Role Lookup; ~88% live / 12% cached on the ≤29-day setting; LinkDB cache-first mode; sunset note) — checked July 2026
  4. 4.Nubela — the founder's account of the LinkedIn lawsuit (case caption, N.D. Cal., filed 24 Jan 2025; the six claims LinkedIn brought) — checked July 2026
  5. 5.Proxycurl pricing page, archived 31 May 2025 (endpoint catalogue incl. Person & Company Search API; LinkDB at 472,880,151 profiles) — the live page now returns 404 — checked July 2026
  6. 6.Nubela — Proxycurl People API page ("Proxycurl is no longer in service") — checked July 2026
  7. 7.LinkedIn Pressroom — "LinkedIn Wins Legal Battle To Protect Member Data" (case resolved, 28 July 2025) — checked July 2026
  8. 8.Social Media Today — LinkedIn wins legal case against Proxycurl (permanent injunction terms, quoting LinkedIn VP of Legal) — checked July 2026
  9. 9.NinjaPear (Nubela) — pricing and trial terms for the successor product — checked July 2026

Try Datamagnet against Proxycurl on your own data

10 free credits, no credit card. Run the same lookups through both and compare the JSON yourself.

  • Live data at request time
  • Charged only on success
  • No seats, no annual contract
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