2 min read
Why we give away routing and charge for storage
Routing, one API, one key and MCP are free on GridRouter. Paid plans will charge for what we store and run for you. Here is the split, and why.
Waterfall enrichment explained
A waterfall asks data vendors in order until one finds the answer. How the order, stop rules, merging and billing work, and what to check before you trust one.
The GridRouter team3 min read
No single data vendor finds everyone. One has better coverage of European mid-market companies, another of US startups, a third of mobile numbers. A waterfall asks vendors one after another until one of them finds the answer, so your coverage is the union of theirs.
How a waterfall runs
Take a work email lookup for one person:
- Send the name and company domain to the first vendor.
- If it finds a verified email, stop.
- If it misses, times out or errors, send the same input to the next vendor.
- Repeat until a vendor finds it or the list runs out.
The idea is simple. The details decide whether it saves you money or quietly wastes it.
The five settings that matter
Order. Put vendors with the best hit rate for your kind of record first, or the cheapest first if you run large volumes. The right order depends on your data, so it helps to see each vendor's measured fill rate and accuracy before choosing.
Stop rule. "First hit" stops at any answer. "First verified" keeps going until an answer passes verification. "Until fields filled" keeps going until every field you asked for has a value. A looser rule is cheaper; a stricter one is more accurate.
Merge. When two vendors both answer, which value wins? Options include the highest-quality source, the value most vendors agree on, the most recent, or the verified one. Keeping the values that disagreed tells you when to be suspicious.
Limits per step. A timeout, a retry policy and a maximum cost stop one slow or expensive vendor from holding up the whole run.
Billing. Most tools bill only when a result is found, so a miss costs nothing. Check what counts as "found" and whether a retry of the same request is billed twice.
Where waterfalls live today
Waterfall enrichment is offered in a few different shapes:
| Tool | Waterfall | How it bills |
|---|---|---|
| Waterfall | 30+ vendors behind one request and response schema | One credit per verified result, covering the whole waterfall; misses are free |
| FullEnrich | Work email, mobile, personal email and reverse lookup | Monthly credits, used only when verified data is found |
| BetterContact | 20+ email and phone providers | Monthly credits, charged only for valid data |
| pipe0 | Waterfall pipes with a default provider order | Monthly credits, used only when a pipe or search succeeds |
These tools sell the data: they hold the vendor accounts and charge you credits. That's convenient if you don't want vendor contracts of your own.
How GridRouter does it
GridRouter runs waterfalls on your own vendor keys, so each vendor bills you at your own rate and GridRouter adds nothing on top. A waterfall is a saved definition for one capability:
- Steps are catalog endpoints, each with its own timeout, retries with backoff, maximum cost, required fields and minimum confidence.
- Speed profiles can run steps one by one or hedge a slow vendor with the next one.
- Stop rules combine: first hit, first verified, until fields filled, all then merge, or a condition on the data.
- Merge is set per field, and the values that disagreed are kept with the result.
- Every attempt is logged as a child of the run, with the vendor, the outcome and what it cost.
- A repeat lookup can be answered from your private cache, free, when you already paid for that fact.
Several waterfalls can be chained into a pipeline, where a later stage reads an earlier stage's output: find the company, then the person, then verify the email.
Routing is free. The Free plan includes five saved waterfalls; paid plans will add more, along with queues for large runs. The comparisons cover each waterfall tool with sources.