What is a credit?
A credit is the unit every plan measures. The API charges one credit for a deal, an investor or a parcel the first time your account gets it, on any route or tool. To read the same record again costs nothing while the plan has credit. A buyer match costs 2 credits a call, plus 1 per investor new to your account. Plans and limits has the full table.What does the Free plan include, and why does it ask for a card?
The Free plan gives 250 credits in the first month, then 100 a month. It asks for a card at sign-up and never charges it. The card raises the cost of a fake account, and a change to a paid plan charges it as the checkout shows. Get an API key has the steps.Is there a sandbox?
No. A Free key is the test key. It sees the same data under the same rules as a paid key, because the data is the product. Develop on Free, then change plan when the allowance is not enough. Sandbox is production says why.Which markets does the API cover?
Read Which data is available where. It lists every market in production, every dataset the market serves and the as-of date of each. Every response carriesmeta.coverage[], one entry per loaded market, so a
new market answers the day it lands.
How fresh is the data?
Every response carries the as-of date of the data it reads, inmeta.coverage[]. The API counts every “days since”
number from that date, not from today. The financing, lien, valuation and lender numbers are a dated snapshot, and
meta.dated[] says so. Read the dates, and design for data that is weeks old. Coverage and
freshness and Dated data have the detail.
Can I get phone numbers or emails?
Not on this host. The API never serves the fields that identify a natural person. Those are the people behind an entity, their mailing addresses, the skip-trace targets, and the listing agents’ names, phones and emails. Every such field comes back null, and the record says so withcontact_redacted: true. Authentication
says who does get them.
Can I use it from Claude, Cursor or another MCP client?
Yes.POST /mcp at https://api.investorlift.com/mcp answers Model Context Protocol clients with twenty-six
read-only tools, out of the tables /v1 serves. The same key, the same credits and the same terms apply. The MCP
endpoint explains it, and Connecting a client has the entry for each client.
What occurs when I reach a limit?
At the plan’s requests a minute or a day, the API answers429 rate_limited with Retry-After. Wait, then retry the
same request. At the period’s credits, the charged routes answer 403 quota_exceeded until the period resets or the
plan changes. A request over what the plan allows answers 403 plan_limit and names the limit. At a
limit has every case.