Ploid brings together publicly available information about people and companies from across the web and lets you query it in plain language. The official site describes it as a living index of more than two billion people ─ not a database built once and left alone, but an index that is kept up to date on an ongoing basis. There are four ways in: a web app, a REST API, a CLI, and an MCP server, so agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor can call it directly. It is designed for teams that want to fold “look this person up” work into an agent’s workflow, whether that is researching decision makers for sales, building a candidate list for recruiting, or running early diligence on an investment.
Key Features
- Natural-language search for people and companies: Describe who you are looking for ─ a role, an industry, a location ─ as a sentence, and Ploid returns matching people and companies. There is no query syntax to learn
- Superprofile: Social accounts, work history, and behavioral signals from multiple sources are merged into a single profile tied to one person, so you receive consolidated information rather than scattered fragments
- Multimodal analysis: Images and video are analyzed alongside text, picking up signals from posted photos, conference talks, and similar material
- Verified contact details: Work emails, personal emails, and mobile numbers can be retrieved with verification applied. Requests that return no hit are not billed
- Agent API: Hand it a job written in plain language and the model decides which research path to take, through a dedicated endpoint (
POST /v1/agent) - MCP server and CLI: A hosted MCP server with OAuth 2.1 lets MCP clients such as ChatGPT and Claude connect. An official CLI for macOS and Linux is available for terminal users
Pricing
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go | $0.20 / ACU | No monthly fee or per-seat charge. 5 ACU granted to start, a configurable monthly spend limit, and a dedicated Slack channel |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom volume and rates, custom integrations, SSO, role-based access control, multiple workspaces, priority support |
The official pricing page also spells out consumption: people search costs 1 ACU per 10 results, generating a Superprofile costs 25 ACU, a work email costs 1 ACU, a personal email 3 ACU, a mobile number 10 ACU, and agent research costs 1 ACU for standard or 2 ACU for deep runs. Requests that return no hit cost 0 ACU ─ they are not billed.
Pricing is current as of September 2026. Check the official site for the latest details.
Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- Because the index is refreshed continuously, details that go stale after a job change or internal move reflect the state at the moment you look
- With an API, a CLI, and MCP all available, manual list-building can be handed over to an agent as an automated step
- Since failed lookups are not billed, researching contacts with an unpredictable hit rate does not quietly run up costs
- Images and video are part of the analysis, so you may still find corroboration for people with a thin text footprint
- There is no setup fee and no per-seat charge, so you can start small and decide on full adoption later
⚠️ Cons
- The company was founded in 2025, so third-party reviews and long-term operational track records are still limited
- Because it is built on collected public data, verifying accuracy and judging compliance with each country’s data protection laws falls to the user
- Usage-based pricing alone makes monthly costs harder to predict for high-volume workloads
- Free usage is limited to the initial 5 ACU grant, so a serious evaluation requires paid usage
- The Sets feature is in private preview and not generally available
Comparison with Similar Services
| Service | Type | How it differs from Ploid |
|---|---|---|
| Clay | Workflow-style data platform | Strong at bundling and automating external data sources. Ploid centers on its own index and natural-language search |
| Apollo.io | Sales intelligence | A SaaS that combines data with outreach execution. Ploid leans toward data, a search API, and agent integration |
| People Data Labs | Data provider | Supplies people and company data through an API. Ploid puts natural-language queries and its Agent API front and center |
| Clearbit (HubSpot) | Enrichment API | Focused on filling in company and contact records. Ploid emphasizes merging multiple profiles for an individual and multimodal analysis |
Who Is It For
- Teams that want to move sales list building and decision-maker identification from manual work to an automated agent step
- Recruiters who would rather describe requirements in a sentence than work through a job board’s search form
- Anyone doing early investment or M&A research who needs a quick read on a target person’s or company’s background
- Developers who want to build a people-research step into agents such as Claude Code or Cursor
- Small teams that do not need a seat-based sales tool year round and only want to look things up when the need arises
Summary
Researching people involves a lot of small steps ─ searching, cross-checking, confirming contact details ─ and it quietly eats into a team’s time. Ploid collapses that sequence into natural-language queries reachable through an API, a CLI, and MCP, so agents can run it. Long-term operational examples are still ahead of it as a new service, but with no setup fee and no charge for failed lookups, trying it carries little risk. Start with the initial grant, see whether the people you actually need show up, and judge full adoption from the hit rate you observe. Before that, it is worth confirming how handling the personal data you retrieve fits your own policies and the laws that apply to you.