StoreCensus alternatives: 6 options, priced per contact
StoreInspect, Store Leads, Charm.io, BuiltWith, Wappalyzer and ShopLeads compared on platform coverage, contact unlocks and cost per decision-maker.
ListNovember 12, 2026 · 12 min read
StoreCensus and its closest rival StoreInspect sell the same shape of thing: a Shopify-first store index with contact unlocks in the same account. So the switch is almost never about coverage. It is about three numbers on the pricing page, and the one most comparisons never calculate: what one decision-maker contact actually costs you. ShopLeads is our product, so we say so and put it first; the other five are described from their own pages, read on November 9, 2026.
For reference, the thing you are leaving. StoreCensus searches 5,093,757 Shopify and WooCommerce stores with 25+ data points each, updated weekly, publishes 100+ filter attributes, describes its contact emails as SMTP-verified, and routes matching stores into Apollo, Instantly, Smartlead or Zapier. Worth knowing before you quote it: its homepage says 4.1K+ apps tracked while its pricing page says 8,300+ Shopify apps indexed, so cite the page you read.
Which platforms your tier covers, not which platforms the vendor covers. StoreCensus Starter is Shopify only; WooCommerce starts on Professional. Store Leads Premium and Pro cover any two platforms, and all platforms starts at Elite.
Whether decision-maker contacts are on your tier at all. StoreCensus Starter does not include them. That single line is the most common reason a cheap plan turns out not to do the job.
What one contact costs, including the plan you had to buy to get it. This is arithmetic, and the table below does it.
All three come off the two pricing pages. StoreCensus charges 1 credit to unlock a store contact and 2 for a decision-maker, with unused credits carried forward and extra credits at $8 per 1,000 (StoreCensus pricing). StoreInspect counts contact reveals instead, with no credit arithmetic at all (StoreInspect pricing).
What a decision-maker contact costs on each plan
Plan
Monthly price
Included unlock budget
Per decision-maker contact
StoreCensus Starter
$49
2,000 credits, store contacts only
Not available on this tier
StoreCensus Professional
$99
5,000 credits, 2 per decision-maker
About $0.04
StoreCensus Growth
$149
8,000 credits, 2 per decision-maker
About $0.037
StoreCensus extra credits
Add-on
$8 per 1,000 credits
About $0.016
StoreInspect Pro
$99
1,000 contact reveals
About $0.099
StoreInspect Business
$249
3,000 contact reveals
About $0.083
StoreInspect Scale
$599
10,000 contact reveals
About $0.06
Our arithmetic on the published monthly list prices and unlock costs on the StoreCensus pricing page and the StoreInspect pricing page, read November 9, 2026. A credit and a reveal are not the same unit, so read the row above before you read the number: StoreCensus bills 2 credits per decision-maker and StoreInspect bills one reveal per contact.
Two things fall out of that table that neither vendor puts in a headline. StoreCensus top-up credits are cheaper per credit than the credits bundled into a plan, so a small plan plus top-ups can beat a bigger plan if your volume is spiky. And the cost per contact falls as you go up the StoreInspect tiers but does not move much on StoreCensus, so the two curves cross: at low volume with decision-makers needed, StoreCensus is the cheaper unit, and at high volume StoreInspect closes most of the gap while keeping the budget fixed and predictable.
Before you compare per-contact prices, compare what a contact is. One vendor's "contact" is the store's general address, another's is a named person with a title, and a third's is a person with a work email whose verification status is shown to you. A cheap store-level address and an expensive named decision-maker are not the same purchase.
The six alternatives
1
ShopLeads
Eight platforms, and you pay by the field
The two constraints that send people looking past StoreCensus are platform coverage and the shape of the bill. This answers both. Eight platforms are indexed rather than two, so a WooCommerce or BigCommerce segment is a filter rather than a different product; and nothing is charged by the reveal. A name, an email, a phone, a profile and a full record each cost a different number of credits, so you are not paying a whole-contact price to learn one field. Stores are scanned and put through rules and an AI check before anybody is attached, so the brands you filter are real DTC brands rather than resellers or suppliers.
The platform list: Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce, Wix, Squarespace and Square.
Per-field unlock pricing, with a free preview call that returns the exact cost before a credit moves, and searching, counting and reading a store all free and never revealing a contact. The credit numbers are on the pricing page.
Store filters: installed apps and technologies by exact name, tech gaps such as no email platform or no reviews app, monthly sales bands from 10k-100k up to 10M+, country, category, product keywords, social following, and whether the brand also sells through other retailers or runs its own physical stores.
People filters: seniority from owner down to manager, about 30 departments, titles to include or exclude, location, and whether the work email has been checked. Dated store events, each with the person to write to, are open to every account and revealed per store, in credits.
Same filters over a REST API and MCP server. Open signup: a 7-day trial with 500 free credits and a card.
StoreInspect is the straight swap if you are happy on Shopify alone. Every row carries a traffic tier, a lead score and the contacts it found, which makes it quick to take a niche and work down it by size, and its plans are priced in reveals rather than credits, which is the easiest budget on this page to forecast (StoreInspect pricing).
Free forever at 10 reveals a month with 50 results per search and no exports. Pro $99, Business $249 and Scale $599 carry 1,000, 3,000 and 10,000 reveals, with store exports capped separately at 10,000 to 500,000 unique stores a month (pricing).
API and MCP access start at Pro, which also advertises a 7-day trial for work emails, and annual billing is 20% off (pricing).
No WooCommerce, which is the one thing StoreCensus Professional has over it.
Switch here only if your problem is the platform ceiling rather than the contacts, because this trade runs in both directions. Where StoreCensus gives you two platforms with people attached, Store Leads gives you 421 platforms with nobody attached: 13,990,637 active stores, 9,098 apps and 1,006 technologies tracked, 40-plus attributes per domain, a weekly refresh and about 135,000 new active stores a week (Store Leads).
Watch where the platform count actually unlocks: Premium $75 and Pro $250 cover any two platforms, the same ceiling you are trying to escape, and all platforms begins at Elite $450, with Enterprise at $950 and extra users at $35 (Store Leads).
Exports, API and MCP start at Pro; historical data and product search are Enterprise only (Store Leads).
Contact data is store-level and non-personal by its own description, with personal contact data coming through a third-party integration you enable yourself. So the honest comparison is Elite plus a contact vendor against one StoreCensus plan, which is the arithmetic that sends most people back.
Brand and marketplace research rather than a prospect list
This one does not belong on a cost-per-contact table at all, which is the point of including it: if you have been pricing StoreCensus against Charm you are comparing two different purchases. Charm describes itself as a data intelligence platform tracking metrics across DTC brands plus daily sales data on TikTok Shop globally, for discovering, analyzing and comparing brands (Charm.io) — and it is the only option here treating TikTok Shop as a first-class surface.
There is no public pricing: the call to action is a booked call, so it cannot be put in the table above even in principle. Treat it as a quoted product rather than a card-swipe subscription.
Buy it to answer "which brands in this category are growing, and where are they selling". Do not buy it to answer "who do I email on Monday" — that is what the rest of this page is for.
This is a step out of e-commerce rather than across it, which matters if what you liked about StoreCensus was that every row was a merchant. BuiltWith has a real e-commerce side — its plans page claims over 2500 e-commerce technologies and 2 billion unique e-commerce products across over 26 million e-commerce websites, with spend and revenue attributes (BuiltWith plans) — but it is a technology index with commerce attributes rather than a merchant index, so "which stores exist in my category" is a question you assemble rather than ask.
What you gain is reach and memory: coverage of 491.9 million domains, 128,274 technologies and history going back 41 years, with single-site lookups free forever (plans).
What it costs is a different floor. Basic $295, Pro $495 and Team $995 a month, and Basic is capped at 2 technologies, 2 keywords and 2 retail reports (plans).
Contacts are included rather than bolted on: exportable names, emails and titles for people publicly listed with a business, on every plan (plans). Publicly listed is the operative phrase, and it is rarely the buyer.
One technology, any industry, with verification attached
Wappalyzer sells lead lists built from a technology, single-site lookups, email verification and website alerts, and it is the only option here that bundles verification in the same account as the list. A free account includes 50 lookups and 50 verifications a month plus sample lead lists (Wappalyzer pricing).
Pro $250 a month for one user and two lead-list technology targets, with no included API credits; the API and CRM enrichment start on Business at $450, and Enterprise is quoted from $850 (pricing).
Thin on Shopify apps: its add-ons section lists 181 of them, against the thousands the e-commerce indexes track. Right tool for a JavaScript library, wrong tool for a Shopify app.
The decision flips. You are giving up a fixed reveal budget and a Shopify-only index, so the questions become: do you need WooCommerce or a third platform, and do you want credits that roll over instead of reveals that reset. StoreCensus answers the first from Professional up and carries unused credits forward; Store Leads answers it at Elite but hands you no people; ShopLeads covers eight platforms and prices unlocks per person and per field rather than per month. If you are leaving because the Shopify coverage itself was not deep enough, compare the index sizes before you move: StoreInspect's own home page shows a Shopify store count of 1,919,148 in its search results (StoreInspect).
The check to run on any index before you pay
Every store index reads public signals out of pages you can read yourself, so spot-check it. Pick two stores you know, one mid-sized and one large, and read their homepage HTML:
On November 9, 2026 that returned Klaviyo, Gorgias, Recharge, Rebuy and Elevar for Olipop, and nothing at all for Gymshark, whose homepage loads scripts from four hosts only, all Shopify's or its own. Both are live Shopify storefronts. Now run the same two domains through the trial of whichever index you are considering. If it matches your by-hand result on the mid-sized store and also reports a plausible stack for the large one, it is doing work you cannot do yourself. If it comes back empty on the large store too, you have found the ceiling of fingerprint-based detection, and no vendor on this page is above it.
Do the same spot-check on contacts. Unlock two people on a trial and look at what you got: a title you can verify on LinkedIn, an address at the brand's own domain, and a stated verification status. Three unlocks tell you more about a vendor than any comparison table, including this one.
From the store list to the reply
Narrow to stores that can buy: your platform, a monthly sales band that can afford you, a category you understand, and real brands rather than resellers and dropshippers.
Add the gap your product fills. "No reviews app" and "no loyalty program" are better openers than "uses a competitor".
Add the person before you export: decision-makers only, in the departments you sell to, with a work email whose status you can see.
Read the store before you write: installed apps, whether it also sells through other retailers, and its products give you the one addressed line.
Spend last. Narrow for free, and pay only for the people you will actually write to.
StoreInspect, if you only sell to Shopify merchants and want a fixed monthly reveal budget. Store Leads, if your problem was the two-platform ceiling rather than the contacts. ShopLeads, our product, if you need the decision-maker at the store rather than the store record, across eight platforms.
Is there a free StoreCensus alternative?
There are free tiers, not free alternatives. StoreCensus itself gives 50 actions and 3 credits, StoreInspect gives 10 contact reveals a month with no exports, Store Leads gives a limited preview, and BuiltWith is free for single-site lookups. Every one of them caps the thing you actually want, which is the export.
How much does a decision-maker contact cost?
On published list prices it works out at roughly $0.04 on StoreCensus Professional and roughly $0.10 per reveal on StoreInspect Pro, falling to about $0.06 on its Scale plan (StoreCensus, StoreInspect). A credit and a reveal are different units, so treat the figures as a starting point and check what each vendor includes in a contact.
Does StoreCensus cover WooCommerce on every plan?
No. Its free tier lists Shopify and WooCommerce, its Starter plan lists Shopify only, and WooCommerce returns on Professional and Growth. Decision-maker contacts, API access and the MCP server also start on Professional.
What are the StoreInspect alternatives?
StoreCensus if you want WooCommerce and credits that roll over, Store Leads if you need more than one platform or app history, Charm.io for brand and TikTok Shop research, and ShopLeads if the missing piece is a named decision-maker with a checked work email.
