Demonstration specimen · saved metadata only · 7 October 2026

Choosing a company-profile enrichment route

Apollo and Akta advertise overlapping company-profile fields, but their scope and billing units differ. A renewal decision needs a required-field test before a cheaper price becomes a reason to switch.

This specimen uses saved free Monid metadata checked October 7, approximately 3:03–3:06 p.m. PDT. No provider was run; no customer workload, accuracy result or quality-adjusted saving is claimed. These are dated price cards, not live quotes.

Decision under review

For one company-only profiling workflow, which candidate can supply the fields and freshness the buyer needs at the buyer’s actual usage pattern? Hunter is a screening step; hiring and news are optional signals, not interchangeable profile products.

Five cards, three different jobs

Provider / endpoint	Workflow role	Displayed USD	Use, limits and what remains unknown
Apollo `/organizations/enrich`	profile	$0.026/call	Known-company profile: industry, headcount, revenue, funding, technology, location and description. An unmatched company consumes nothing. One company per call. Provide at least one of domain, company LinkedIn URL, company name or website. Exact match coverage, field completeness, freshness, retries and high-volume eligibility not tested. Monid price listing · Provider docs
Akta `/v1/company/enrichment`	profile	$0.125/result	Known-company profile plus structured business model, product offering and customer-profile sections. Company website or Akta UUID required; bare company name is not accepted. Sections can be selected; omit management_profile for this company-only workflow. Price is per result. No unmatched/error/refund rule is disclosed in this saved card. Exact result count/billing, match quality, freshness, rate limits and volume eligibility not tested. Monid price listing · Provider docs
Hunter `/discover`	screening	$0/call	Build a company/domain candidate set from business filters. Screening only. At least one structured filter. Maximum 100 companies per page; offset maximum 10,000. Use company name/domain only. No contact routes are part of this specimen. A candidate company is not a complete enrichment record. Monid price listing · Provider docs
Clay `/enrichment/company-job-openings`	adjunct	$0.032/call	An optional hiring signal. Not a firmographic profile replacement. Company domain required. Asynchronous; total job count plus an upstream detail sample of roughly 10 postings. A missing role in that sample does not establish no relevant hiring. Monid price listing · Provider docs
Context.dev `/news/search`	adjunct	$0.000253/returned article	Optional dated company news. Not a firmographic profile replacement. 1 Context.dev credit per page of 10 returned articles — the rate the vendor's credits_consumed reports (measured: 10 articles = 1 credit, 30 = 3). No articles, no charge. The admission hold is the requested limit (default 10). Identify company by name, domain, ticker or ISIN. Default 10 and maximum 100 articles per page; each page bills separately. Requested limit sizes admission hold; billing notes use 10-article pages. Deduplicate syndicated coverage by story_id and inspect original source before using a claim. Monid price listing · Provider docs

Hypothetical monthly matched-profile arithmetic

Assume one request and one billable matched profile/result per company. Apollo: matched calls × $0.026. Akta: returned matched results × $0.125. The two outputs are not assumed equivalent.

Hypothetical matched profiles/month	Apollo base	Akta base	Displayed price gap
1,000	$26.00	$125.00	$99.00
10,000	$260.00	$1,250.00	$990.00
100,000	$2,600.00	$12,500.00	$9,900.00

The gap is arithmetic, not achieved savings or an approved budget. The $750 analytical service fee is separate from these hypothetical provider data charges.

One request and one billable matched profile/result per company for each enrichment provider.
The providers are alternative ways to satisfy a required-field rubric; their advertised outputs are not assumed equivalent.
No retries, errors, duplicate/cached lookups, repeated refreshes, adjunct calls, human verification cost, taxes or price changes are included.
Apollo unmatched company calls are excluded under the explicit no-charge card note; other failure/refund behavior is unknown.
Akta per-result billing is modeled as exactly one returned billable result per company; this interpretation requires confirmation.
100,000/month is a hypothetical arithmetic scenario, not verified rate-limit, availability or eligibility capacity.

What I would do with this evidence

If the decision requires core firmographics for already known domains, use Apollo as the first candidate to evaluate: its advertised scope covers those fields and its displayed rate is lower.
If the decision needs structured business model, product-offering or customer-profile context, evaluate Akta against those required sections. The metadata supports a different scope, not proof of better data.
Use Hunter only before enrichment when the company/domain list does not exist. Add hiring or news only when a stated decision needs those signals; do not buy every adjunct by default.
Do not select or renew from this price comparison alone. Choose only after the required-field, match and freshness test passes under the buyer’s usage assumptions.

What could change the decision?

Apollo could fail the required fields or freshness test. Akta’s additional sections could be incomplete or irrelevant to the workflow. A different refresh/retry pattern, licensing restriction or volume limit could change the usable cost. None of those questions is answered by a catalog description.

The next acceptance test

No new test has been executed. Start with buyer-supplied company-only samples or existing approved response exports. If new paid calls are needed, agree a separate bounded execution budget first.

Define one decision and a must-have field list, acceptable freshness and consequences of wrong/missing company matches.
Buyer-approved rubric; no personal-contact requirement.
Use a small representative, buyer-supplied company-only response set or existing approved exports from both providers. New provider execution requires a separate explicit approval and budget.
Comparable outputs with canonical company identity and provenance. No calls made for this specimen.
Count correct company matches, present must-have fields, source/freshness evidence, unknowns and manual corrections for the same inputs. Do not score a missing field as zero activity.
Raw comparison counts; no invented accuracy score or best-provider claim.
Check actual billable units/failures and volume eligibility, then recalculate under the buyer’s refresh, retry and adjunct pattern.
Revised price model with observable acceptance gaps.
Select, keep, combine for a narrower requirement, or reject the candidates with a stated reason. Record what additional evidence could change the decision.
Conditional provider decision and a finite follow-up test, not a production rollout.

What a commissioned brief would add

The selected pilot is a $750 fixed-fee Provider Decision Brief for one workflow and up to five candidate providers. It would turn the buyer’s required fields, existing spend, volume and renewal decision into a cited comparison, conditional recommendation and a finite acceptance test. Scope and invoice are agreed separately. Provider execution or data spend is not included or authorized by this specimen.

This demonstration supplies the comparison method and exact dated price arithmetic. It does not select a best provider, verify advertised quality or replace the buyer’s usage inputs.