Clearbit Autocomplete API: Is It Still Free in 2026?

Why so many sites say it is dead

Search for this and you will find directory listings marking the Autocomplete API as discontinued, and dozens of vendor blog posts announcing that Clearbit’s free era is over.

They are describing something real, just not this endpoint. HubSpot acquired Clearbit in December 2023 and then retired the free surface in stages. Because those announcements came close together and used similar wording, “Clearbit free tools sunset” got flattened in people’s heads into “everything free at Clearbit is gone”.

There is a second reason, and it is worth naming. Most pages ranking for this topic belong to companies selling an enrichment product. A free endpoint that still works is inconvenient for that pitch. Nobody needs to lie for the message to drift.

What died and what is still running

Here is the whole picture in one table, so you can stop guessing which Clearbit thing your old code depends on.

Two practical consequences. If your code calls company.clearbit.com/v2/companies/find without being an existing paying customer, that stopped working in April 2025. If your app has logo.clearbit.com inside an image tag, those images have been broken since December 2025.

If your code calls autocomplete.clearbit.com/v1/companies/suggest, it is probably still working right now.

What the endpoint returns in 2026

This matters, because most tutorials online were written before December 2025 and show you a response that no longer matches reality.

GET https://autocomplete.clearbit.com/v1/companies/suggest?query=Salesforce

// First two of five results returned. Nothing else edited.
[
  {
    "name": "Salesforce",
    "domain": "salesforce.com",
    "logo": null
  },
  {
    "name": "Salesforce Ben",
    "domain": "salesforceben.com",
    "logo": null
  }
]

Three fields. That is the entire response.

There is no industry, no headcount, no revenue, no location and no founding year. Older tutorials that show a logo.clearbit.com URL in this response were accurate when written and are not any more. If you see a tool displaying industry data next to an Autocomplete result, it is either paying a second provider or making it up.

Replacing the dead logo field

You do not need a paid logo service for most interfaces. A favicon is enough when you are showing a small icon next to a company name, and it costs nothing:

<!-- Free, no key, works for most companies -->
<img src="https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=stripe.com" alt="">

<!-- Always pair it with a letter avatar fallback,
     because small companies often have no usable favicon -->

If you need a real logo at proper resolution, a paid logo service is the honest answer. If you only ever needed a 24 pixel icon, a favicon plus a letter avatar solves it and always will.

The rate limit nobody quotes

This is the part that is missing from every guide we found while researching this page, and it is documented by Clearbit themselves.

What this changes in practice:

• Read the response headers instead of guessing. Clearbit says the current limit status comes back with each request, so your code can react rather than assume.
• A fixed 300 millisecond delay is over cautious for small batches. That is roughly three per second against a documented ceiling of ten.
• Cap concurrency, not just spacing. Three to five parallel requests with a short gap is comfortable and far quicker than a strict serial loop.
• Still be reasonable. It is a free service with no revenue attached to your usage. Staying well under a limit costs you nothing and keeps the endpoint alive for everyone.

The warning in Clearbit’s own docs

Before you build anything important on this, read what Clearbit says about it. Two points from their help centre matter more than anything a blog post will tell you.

First, it is not maintained. Clearbit states that because these are free products they are offered as-is and are not regularly maintained by their engineering team.

Second, the data is automated. They explain that the returned data is curated by automation, so occasional wrong results can appear and can persist until the automation corrects them. No human is checking that Bolt resolves to the Bolt you meant.

How to call it in one line

There is no authentication, no header and no SDK. It is a plain GET request. Paste this into your browser address bar and you will see the raw JSON:

https://autocomplete.clearbit.com/v1/companies/suggest?query=Shopify

In JavaScript, the minimum viable version is three lines. Because there is no key to leak, this is one of the few APIs you can safely call straight from browser code:

const url = 'https://autocomplete.clearbit.com/v1/companies/suggest?query=';

async function lookup(name) {
  const res = await fetch(url + encodeURIComponent(name));
  return res.ok ? await res.json() : [];
}

lookup('Shopify').then(r => console.log(r[0]?.domain));   // shopify.com

That version is fine for a quick check and wrong for real work, because it trusts the first result and treats a network failure the same as a missing company. Our company URL API guide has the production version with match scoring, alternative candidates, proper error states, and the same logic in Python and Google Apps Script.

When to stop relying on it

Being honest about fit saves you a migration later. Use this table before you commit.

What to do the day it stops

Plan this now while it takes ten minutes rather than later while something is broken.

1. Cache every result you get. Company domains barely change. Thirty days of cached lookups keyed by normalised name means an outage is invisible to most users.
2. Put it behind your own function. One lookupDomain() in your codebase, not a fetch call scattered across twelve files. Swapping providers becomes one edit.
3. Keep a fallback configured. Hunter.io has a free tier and real support. Wiring it behind a flag now is cheap insurance.
4. Fail loudly, not silently. Show users that the lookup is unavailable. Do not let a dead endpoint quietly report every company as not found.

Frequently asked questions

Written by Rizwan Aslam. Published 5 August 2026. Endpoint behaviour and dates verified on that date. This page changes when the facts do, so if you find something out of date, tell us and we will correct it and say what changed.