Five email OSINT tools compared for 2026, and one answer: if you are paying your own money, start with OSINTsearch. Its free plan runs 20 search units a week with JSON, CSV and PDF export, per its pricing page on September 14, 2026, and Pro works out to $0.023 a search at full use. The other four each win one job: Behind The Email for bulk lead enrichment, EmailOSINT for 500 lookups a month at $29, osint.industries for name and wallet inputs with an API from £49, Epieos for its Google module at €0.
All five are hosted reverse email lookup tools. Prices come from each vendor's pricing page and terms, read on September 14, 2026. Result counts come from two OSINTsearch exports dated September 5, 2026: one email search on an address we do not print, and the free-plan username export of the handle cia. The Behind The Email domain was registered November 15, 2025 and the EmailOSINT domain April 24, 2026. We build the Revealer.US email lookup; it is not one of the five. For method, see the email OSINT investigation workflow.
OSINTsearch vs Epieos vs osint.industries vs Behind The Email vs EmailOSINT
All plan lines as of September 2026; per-search figures assume full use, with the arithmetic below.
| Tool | Inputs | Free tier | Entry paid plan | Quota shape | Per search at full use | API tier | Exports | Refund |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OSINTsearch | Email, username, phone | $0, 20 a week, exports on | Starter $20/mo, 50 a week | Weekly, no rollover | $0.092 Starter, $0.023 Pro | Enterprise | JSON, CSV, PDF, all plans | 7 days, first purchase |
| Epieos | Email, phone | €0.00, Google, Email Checker and Skype, watermark | Osinter €29.99/mo, 30 full-access requests | Monthly, no carryover | About €1.00 | Custom, unpriced | JSON, CSV, PDF per blog | None |
| osint.industries | Email, phone, username, name, wallet | None on the page | Basic £19/mo, 30 credits | Credits, one per search | £0.63, £0.49, £0.33 | Intermediate £49/mo | PDF, Word, Excel, JSON | Non-refundable |
| Behind The Email | Masked, count unpublished | Plus $14.99/mo, 100 a day | Daily | $0.005 Plus, $0.003 Business | Pro $29.99/mo | Excel, CSV; PDF on Business | Non-refundable | |
| EmailOSINT | $0, 3 a day, redacted | Pro $29/mo, 500 a month | Monthly | $0.058 Pro, $0.030 Business | Business $149/mo | PDF in app; JSON via API | Non-refundable |
The input column matters more than it looks: when an email hit hands you a handle, only OSINTsearch and osint.industries list a username input on their public pages.
Which email OSINT tools are free, and what the free tier shows
| Tool | Free searches | What you see | Breach data | Export |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OSINTsearch | 20 a week (pricing page, September 14, 2026) | "Available profile details and exports included" | Counts and years only | JSON, CSV, evidence-only PDF |
| Epieos | Not published | Google, Email Checker and Skype, "Heavy watermark" | Have I Been Pwned module for visitors | Not stated |
| osint.industries | No free plan | Trial "to eligible parties" | No free plan | None |
| Behind The Email | Not published | "Free searches hide some results" | Pro and up | Plus and up |
| EmailOSINT | "3 lookups / day", no signup | Accounts "Redacted", AI summary included | "Counts only" | Pro and up |
Two of the five publish a free quota. EmailOSINT redacts what it returns; OSINTsearch is the only one that pairs a published quota with available profile fields and a file at the end.
Email lookup cost per search, with the arithmetic shown
| Plan | Arithmetic | Per search |
|---|---|---|
| OSINTsearch Starter, $20, 50 a week | $20 × 12 ÷ (50 × 52) = $240 ÷ 2,600 | $0.092 |
| OSINTsearch Pro, $49.99, 500 a week | $49.99 × 12 ÷ (500 × 52) = $599.88 ÷ 26,000 | $0.023 |
| Epieos Osinter, €29.99, 30 full-access requests | €29.99 ÷ 30 | About €1.00 |
| osint.industries Basic, £19, 30 credits | £19 ÷ 30 | £0.63 |
| osint.industries Intermediate, £49, 100 credits | £49 ÷ 100 | £0.49 |
| osint.industries Advanced, £99, 300 credits | £99 ÷ 300 | £0.33 |
| Behind The Email Plus, $14.99, 100 a day | $14.99 ÷ 3,000 (30 days) | $0.005 |
| Behind The Email Business, $99.99, 1,000 a day | $99.99 ÷ 30,000 | $0.003 |
| EmailOSINT Pro, $29, 500 a month | $29 ÷ 500 | $0.058 |
| EmailOSINT Business, $149, 5,000 a month | $149 ÷ 5,000 | $0.030 |
The OSINTsearch figures are the ones its homepage plan cards print. Nothing is converted; these are floors. At 100 searches a month the dollar order changes: Behind The Email Plus $0.15, OSINTsearch Starter $0.20, EmailOSINT Pro $0.29. In pounds, osint.industries Intermediate is £0.49 (£49 ÷ 100). Epieos Osinter cannot reach 100 full-access requests in a month, and OSINTsearch Free covers about 87 of them at $0 (20 × 52 ÷ 12).
OSINTsearch: three inputs, a weekly quota, exports on Free
OSINTsearch takes a username, an email address or a phone number. The homepage lists 761 endpoints per username scan as of September 14, 2026; blog posts dated September 5, 2026 put the email sweep at 203 modules and phone at 24. The reverse email lookup page says a search may return "account matches, associated usernames, display names, profile details, or an account-presence signal". Its blog holds every module to one rule: "a check must read the platform's answer without sending the address anything".
One real email search. On September 5, 2026 we ran one address through the email corpus. It came back registered on 14 services, from Adobe and Dropbox to Chess.com and Snapchat. Of the 14 rows, 13 carried a profile URL, 4 a handle and display name, 3 an avatar, 2 a bio, 1 a masked recovery phone, 1 a user id and 1 a creation date. The identity block scored its probable name at 0.07 from one source, a score that says discard it. An email search here is mostly a registration map, with a pivot into the username sweep.
The free plan on a real handle. The cia export, run on Free on September 5, 2026, lists 329 profiles across 317 services: 291 display names, 221 user ids, 213 avatars, 160 real creation dates, 100 bios, 51 locations, a former username each from Steam and Instagram, and a probable-name confidence of 0.01, the honest score for a dictionary handle. Free was 15 a week when that ran; the OSINTsearch pricing page reads "20 search units every week" as of September 14, 2026, and every account, including Free, exports JSON, CSV and PDF.
What the plans gate, beyond the prices in the tables above: a search is 1 unit, a breach reveal 5, deep search 3 to 24 by depth, and quotas reset Monday 00:00 UTC with no rollover. Yearly billing is $199 for Starter and $499 for Pro. Breach data is "Counts only" on Free, partial on Starter, full with identifiers on Pro; deep search is on Pro and Enterprise; the REST API is Enterprise only. The head-to-heads go deeper: OSINTsearch vs Epieos, OSINTsearch vs Behind The Email, OSINTsearch vs EmailOSINT.
The other four email OSINT tools
In table order, gates as of September 2026.
Epieos: a Google module at €0, 30 full requests for €29.99
Google is the first module listed on the Member card, the visitor modal and the Osinter footnote, so it is on the €0 plan; reviewers, not Epieos's own pages, describe it as returning a name, profile photo and last-active timestamp. Its policy lines are firm: "We do not notify the target" and "we do not save any of your requests and results". A visitor with no account runs eight email modules; Osinter lists all modules including LinkedIn, 25 named in the pricing footnote, sized by the April 2026 blog at "up to 200 social networks and online platforms".
The gates, as of September 14, 2026. Member is €0.00 under a "Heavy watermark". Osinter is €29.99 a month (€27.08 a month on yearly billing) for "30 full-access requests / month", about €1.00 each. API access sits on Custom, unpriced. No daily quota is published, prices exclude VAT, the Terms limit use to business customers, Epieos "does not make any refunds", and no public page offers username search. Source: Epieos pricing page.
osint.industries: five inputs and an API from £49
osint.industries has the widest input set: email, phone, username, name and crypto wallet (ETH, BTC, TRC) on every self-serve plan, plus a self-serve API from Intermediate at £49 a month for 100 credits. One credit is one search; the pricing table defines credits as "The total number of searches you can make per month". The FAQ says credits "do not expire at the end of the month" and a cancelled subscriber keeps them; top-ups run to 30,000. Every plan gets PDF and Word reports.
There is no free plan on the pricing page as of September 2026, only a trial "to eligible parties" and 30 free credits a month for vetted government and law-enforcement users. Basic is £19 for 30 credits (£0.63 each), Advanced £99 for 300 (£0.33), pounds only, no yearly option. The Terms (effective August 21, 2026) restrict the service to professional users, subject to vetting, and say unused credits "do not roll over unless an Order says otherwise", which is not what the FAQ says; read both before buying for rollover. Source: osint.industries pricing page; the credit arithmetic is in osint.industries pricing vs OSINTsearch.
Behind The Email: 100 email searches a day for $14.99
Behind The Email's pitch is "Turn any email into a complete profile", and the profile it means is a work profile: LinkedIn employment and education, Microsoft and Teams signals, Google Maps contributions, GitHub and TikTok profiles and a breach block, built for "Cold Email Research" and "Lead Generation". Plus is $14.99 a month for "100 searches/day" with export to Excel or CSV. Pro, $29.99 for 200 a day, adds "API Access" and "Data Breach Results". Business, $99.99 for 1,000 a day, adds "Bulk Search Access" and PDF reports. For bulk enrichment by email this is the tool: nothing else here sells 1,000 searches a day under $100.
What it does not do, as of September 2026: take anything but an email address, or publish a free count (the site says "Free searches hide some results"). Source: Behind The Email pricing page.
EmailOSINT: 500 lookups a month for $29
EmailOSINT (emailosint.org) is the simplest offer: one box, one input, and Pro at $29 a month for "500 lookups / month" with "Full unmasked results", breach details, export and search history, or $24 a month billed as $290 a year. Every search ends with an AI summary and a risk score. The site lists "100+" sources. Free needs no account: "3 lookups / day". Business, $149 a month, buys 5,000 lookups, five seats, infostealer-log results, batch jobs and an API at 30 requests a minute.
The trade for $29 is scope, as of September 2026. Email is the one input, free results are "Redacted" with breach "Counts only", app export is PDF and JSON is API-only, and the API itself waits for Business: "The API is included in Business and higher." Fees are "non-refundable", with disputes within 7 days of the charge. Source: EmailOSINT pricing page.
Email lookup tools compared: which one for which job
| You need | Use | The deciding number |
|---|---|---|
| A free plan every week, with a file at the end | OSINTsearch Free | 20 a week, JSON, CSV, PDF, $0 |
| Lowest dollar cost per search outside per-day allowances, with username and phone inputs | OSINTsearch Pro | $0.023 at full use |
| Bulk lead enrichment by email, CSV or Excel out | Behind The Email Business | 1,000 a day, $99.99 |
| 500 email lookups a month with breach details | EmailOSINT Pro | $29 |
| Name or wallet input, API from £49 | osint.industries Intermediate | £49, 100 credits |
| The Google module on one address, free | Epieos Member | €0.00, watermarked |
The first row is the pick for three reasons. The free tier: 20 search units a week with available profile fields and a file at the end, where EmailOSINT redacts, Epieos watermarks, Behind The Email does not publish a count and osint.industries has no free plan. The inputs: email, username and phone on one account. The price line: Pro at $0.023 a search, the lowest dollar figure here outside Behind The Email's per-day tiers at $0.005 and $0.003. It has no API below Enterprise, and no per-day bulk allowance, name or wallet input on its public tool pages. Run your own address and handle on osintsearch.org first.
Revealer is not a consumer reporting agency. Its data may not be used for employment, tenant, credit, or insurance eligibility decisions.
The short version
OSINTsearch is the pick: 20 units a week free with JSON, CSV and PDF export, three inputs, $0.023 a search on Pro at full use, and a 7-day refund window. The other four keep their jobs: bulk enrichment at Behind The Email ($99.99 for 1,000 a day), 500 lookups a month for $29 at EmailOSINT, name and wallet input with a £49 API at osint.industries, and the Google module at €0 on Epieos. OSINTsearch's pricing page read 20 search units a week on September 14, 2026, while its homepage card and September 5 posts still say 15; check the page before paying.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best email OSINT tool in 2026? For one person paying their own way, OSINTsearch: a free 20-unit weekly allowance with exports, per its pricing page on September 14, 2026, and $0.023 a search on Pro at full use. For bulk enrichment, Behind The Email Business at $99.99 for 1,000 a day.
Which email OSINT tools are free? Four of the five. OSINTsearch: 20 a week with export. EmailOSINT: "3 lookups / day", redacted. Epieos Member: €0.00, the card says Google, Email Checker and Skype, watermarked. Behind The Email: masked free searches, count unpublished. osint.industries has no free plan, only a trial for eligible parties.
Which email OSINT tool is cheapest per search? In dollars at full use, as of September 2026: Behind The Email Business $0.003 and Plus $0.005, both per-day allowances, then OSINTsearch Pro $0.023, EmailOSINT Business $0.030 and Pro $0.058, OSINTsearch Starter $0.092. In pounds, osint.industries runs £0.33 to £0.63 a credit; in euros, Epieos Osinter is about €1.00 a request. Nothing is converted.
Which email OSINT tools offer refunds? Only OSINTsearch publishes a refund window: "a full refund within 7 calendar days of your initial purchase". Epieos "does not make any refunds"; osint.industries, Behind The Email and EmailOSINT call fees non-refundable in their terms.
Does an email hit prove who owns the account? No, on any of the five. OSINTsearch says a match "does not establish who controls an account", and scored our test address's probable name at 0.07. The osint.industries Terms call an output "an investigative lead or data point, not a verified finding".