ContactOut alternative: the emails and mobiles behind your LinkedIn URLs, as one free file

At its fair use limit, Email is 2,000 emails for $49: $24.50 per 1,000 emails. Email + Phone is $99 for at most 1,000 phone numbers and 2,000 emails a month, so a year of it, $1,188, reaches 12,000 phones at most. The free file holds 4,016,020 mobiles, and 5,182,067 people with a mobile or an email.

ContactOut's bulk API takes 100 LinkedIn URLs a call and spends a credit for each email and each phone it finds. The file does a whole list in one join. Unzip it into us_10m/, pip install duckdb, and put your URLs in linkedin_urls.csv under a url header:

import duckdb

duckdb.sql("create view people as select * from 'us_10m/us_smb_mid_market_persons.parquet'")
duckdb.sql("create view companies as select * from 'us_10m/us_smb_mid_market_companies.parquet'")

# A LinkedIn URL as the file writes it: the part after /in/, decoded and lowercased, so http, no www, a trailing slash or ?utm_source match
duckdb.sql(r"create macro profile(url) as lower(url_decode(regexp_extract(url, 'linkedin\.com/in/([^/?#]+)', 1)))")

# Your LinkedIn URLs, one per row of linkedin_urls.csv under a "url" header, with each one's email and mobile from the file
duckdb.sql("""
  copy (
    select u.url, p.FULL_NAME, p.CURRENT_JOB_TITLE, c.NAME as COMPANY, p.EMAIL, p.MOBILE_PHONE, p.CITY, p.STATE_CODE
    from read_csv('linkedin_urls.csv') u
    left join people p on profile(p.LINKEDIN_URL) = profile(u.url)
    left join companies c on c.LINKEDIN_ID = p.CURRENT_JOB_COMPANY_LINKEDIN_ID
  ) to 'linkedin_urls_with_contacts.csv'
""")

We ran it on a laptop on 1,070 URLs: 1,020 people of the October 2026 file drawn at random, each written one of the ways people paste them (http, no www, a trailing slash, ?utm_source=share, uk.linkedin.com in capitals, /details/experience/, accents written out or percent-encoded), and 50 made-up ones. It took 0.6 s.

About half the people found have a contact, as across the whole file: 5,182,067 of 9,521,154 (54%). A URL the file doesn't hold comes back blank: someone outside the U.S., at a company of fewer than 11 or more than 500 employees, or not in the October release. That's where ContactOut's lookup comes in.

ContactOut is “trusted by 1.4M recruiters and sales reps”, says its sales page. A recruiter's list from the same file, searched by title and place instead of by URL, with the same setup:

# Software engineers in Texas with a mobile phone or an email, with their company, to a CSV
duckdb.sql(r"""
  copy (
    select p.FULL_NAME, p.CURRENT_JOB_TITLE, c.NAME as COMPANY, c.EMPLOYEE_COUNT_RANGE, p.MOBILE_PHONE, p.EMAIL, p.CITY, p.LINKEDIN_URL
    from people p
    left join companies c on c.LINKEDIN_ID = p.CURRENT_JOB_COMPANY_LINKEDIN_ID
    where regexp_matches(p.CURRENT_JOB_TITLE, '\b(software (engineer|developer)|(full[- ]?stack|back[- ]?end|front[- ]?end) (engineer|developer))\b', 'i')
      and p.STATE_CODE = 'TX'
      and (p.MOBILE_PHONE is not null or p.EMAIL is not null)
  ) to 'texas_software_engineers.csv'
""")

The titles are matched as written on LinkedIn; change the pattern, the state or add c.EMPLOYEE_COUNT_RANGE to the where for another list. One profile you're looking at, as ContactOut's extension does:

# One profile you're looking at on LinkedIn
duckdb.sql("""
  select FULL_NAME, CURRENT_JOB_TITLE, EMAIL, MOBILE_PHONE
  from people
  where profile(LINKEDIN_URL) = profile('https://www.linkedin.com/in/their-profile/')
""").show()

The emails are work emails: none of the 2,790,286 is at Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, AOL or iCloud. A candidate's personal email is ContactOut's, not ours.

• The live profile behind each URL, title and experience as they are today: the LinkedIn profile API, at $0.00125 a profile found. A script for a whole CSV: get LinkedIn profile data with Python.
• The same file next to other tools' contacts: Seamless.AI alternative, Lusha alternative, Hunter.io alternative; what each tool's free plan gives: free B2B database. Contacts by title, city or a list of company websites instead of LinkedIn URLs: RocketReach alternative.

The free file is on your dashboard once you sign up with your work email, with the $5 credit and your API key.