Every phone validation API advertises a price per lookup. Almost none of them advertise the price of a useful lookup, because on most platforms the number on the pricing page buys you a format check, and everything you came for costs extra. Line type is one add-on. Carrier is another. Is the number still connected? That’s a third. Litigator screening? Usually not available at any price.
I pulled current pricing from eight services people keep asking about (all figures checked August 2026, so verify before you commit budget) and lined them up against CheckThatPhone. The short version: the cheap APIs are cheap because they’re static databases, the live-data APIs charge per signal until a single number costs four cents, and almost nobody touches compliance data. Here’s the long version.
The comparison table
| Service | Cheapest useful lookup | Free tier | Data source | Ported / activity | Litigator scrub | DNC scrub |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CheckThatPhone | $0.001 to $0.005 | 500/mo | Live carrier network | Yes (both) | Add-on, +1 credit | Free, built in |
| Twilio Lookup | $0.008 (line type) | Format check only | Live carrier | Paid add-ons | No | No |
| Telnyx | $0.0015 (LRN only) | Trial credit | Live carrier (LRN dips) | Ported yes, activity no | No | No |
| Trestle | $0.015 | 25 trial lookups | Behavioral + carrier | Activity score | Add-on (price unlisted) | No |
| IPQS | Not published | 1,000 lookups | Claims live carrier | Yes | Indirect | Separate product |
| Numverify | ~$0.003 | 100/mo | Numbering-plan DB | No | No | No |
| Abstract API | ~$0.0038 | 100 total | Cached database | No | No | No |
| numlookupapi.com | ~$0.002 | 100/mo | Static dataset | No | No | No |
| phonevalidator.com | $0.004 | Captcha-gated singles | Live ported check (US) | Ported yes (US only) | No | No, with a disclaimer |
Six of the eight return nothing about do-not-call status or litigation history. The two that gesture at it (Trestle and IPQS) treat it as a separate purchase. Keep that in mind as we go through the tiers, because it changes the math for anyone doing outbound.
Tier one: the numbering-plan databases
Numverify, Abstract API, and numlookupapi.com all work the same way underneath. They check your number against international numbering plans and a cached carrier table, then hand back validity, line type, carrier, and location. No live query touches the phone network.
Numverify says this outright: their validation “is based on the most up-to-date international numbering plans.” It costs $14.99 a month for 5,000 requests, which sounds fine until you read the plan features closely: 256-bit HTTPS is listed as a benefit for paid customers, and the checkout pre-selects a Platinum Support add-on that runs $479.88 or more per year. Watch for that checkbox.
Abstract API starts at $19 a month and gates its fields by tier, so carrier and location come on one plan while risk data needs the Professional plan. Their docs describe “a large and frequently updated database” refreshed daily to monthly. numlookupapi.com is the cheapest of the three at $9.99 for 5,000 requests, and at the Scale tier the per-lookup cost drops to about $0.00044, genuinely the lowest number in this article.
Here’s the problem with all three: a cached table can’t tell you a number was disconnected last month, ported to a new carrier last year, or reassigned to someone who never opted in. Roughly 1 to 2 percent of any list churns every month. The database validators will keep marking those numbers valid, because in a numbering-plan sense they are. If you’re validating a signup form for a global app and just want to reject typos, any of them is fine and Numverify’s 232-country coverage is a real advantage. If you’re about to call or text US numbers, “valid” from a static table is not the signal you need.
Tier two: telecom platforms billing per signal
Twilio Lookup and Telnyx sit at the other end. Both query live carrier infrastructure, and both charge separately for every piece of the answer.
Twilio’s basic format check is free, which is why it’s the default answer in every developer forum. The useful data starts at $0.008 per request for Line Type Intelligence (carrier plus mobile/landline/VoIP classification). Line Status, the “is this number still reachable” signal, runs another $0.007 at low volume. Caller name is $0.01, US only. Reassigned Number Risk starts at $0.02. Identity Match is $0.10 per request. Stack line type, status, and reassigned risk and you’re at $0.035 per number before anyone dials, and Twilio still has no litigator or DNC data to sell you.
Telnyx prices lower per signal: $0.0015 for an LRN dip (real routing data, this is what carriers use), $0.0025 for carrier, $0.003 for caller name. If you only need portability-corrected routing, that $0.0015 LRN query is the best per-unit price on live data anywhere in this comparison. The catch is that Telnyx is a full telecom platform, so you’re onboarding through carrier-grade KYC to get an account, and stacking the packages for a complete picture lands around $0.007 per number. Again: no compliance data of any kind.
Both are excellent at what they sell. Neither sells what an outbound team actually gets sued over.
Tier three: fraud suites and data companies
IPQS bundles phone validation into a broader fraud-scoring product. The payload is rich (active/disconnected status, prepaid and ported flags, abuse history, breach exposure, reverse lookups) and it’s the only service here besides ours that offers TCPA/DNC scrubbing at all, through a separate list-scrub product. What you can’t easily find is a price. The product page has a 1,000-lookup free tier and a link to talk to sales. If your volume is meaningful, budget for a sales cycle, and note that several response fields are gated behind account upgrades even inside the free tool.
Trestle is the closest thing CheckThatPhone has to a direct feature competitor. Their Phone Validation API returns an activity score from 0 to 100 (a behavioral connected/disconnected proxy built from 12 months of observed activity), a seven-way line-type split that separates fixed from non-fixed VoIP, prepaid status, and an optional Litigator Check add-on. It’s good data. It also costs $0.015 per query on the self-serve plan, with the litigator add-on priced separately and not published, and there’s no ongoing free tier, just a 14-day trial with 25 lookups. Fifteen dollars per thousand numbers, before compliance, is the most expensive self-serve rate in this comparison, roughly double Twilio’s line-type package and fifteen times our 100K-plan credit.
phonevalidator.com is a smaller operation worth mentioning because it shows up in searches constantly. Pay-as-you-go at $0.004 per line-type lookup with a real-time US ported check, no subscription, plus batch processing with a $35 minimum per batch. Two honest caveats from their own site: the ported check doesn’t cover Canada, and their terms state results shouldn’t be relied on for any TCPA-regulated purpose. They’re telling you directly that this is not a compliance tool.
Where CheckThatPhone lands
CheckThatPhone is scoped to US and Canadian numbers only. That’s the trade we made, and if you need to validate numbers in 200 countries, use Numverify or Twilio and don’t look back. The narrow scope is what pays for the depth.
One lookup, one credit, returns the whole picture: live carrier data from our validation network (carrier name, OCN, line type and sub-type), portability status with the LRN, deliverability including deactivation dates, an internal blacklist check, GeoIP with state, city, metro, and IANA timezone, and a recommended action so you’re not writing your own decision logic on top of raw fields. The response carries 25+ fields. There is no per-field pricing. You don’t pay one rate for line type and another to learn the number is dead.
The IP-to-geo piece deserves its own line, because it’s a product other companies sell on its own. Include the contact’s IP address in the request and the same credit returns their location down to city and metro, plus the IANA timezone and UTC offset. Teams normally buy that from a separate IP-geolocation service and stitch the two responses together. Here it rides along free, and it solves a specific compliance problem: TCPA calling-hour rules follow where the person is, not what their area code says, and a 213 number can belong to someone who moved to Miami years ago. No IP on hand? The lookup falls back to area-code-based location, and the response tells you which source it used.
Credits cost $0.005 on the $5 plan, $0.003 on the $30 plan, and $0.001 on the $100 plan, with 500 free lookups every month to test against your real data. Two opt-in add-ons cost one extra credit each: the TCPA litigator scrub, which checks numbers against our litigator database refreshed daily from federal and state court activity, and the landline SMS check, which finds the landlines that can receive texts (charged only when the number is a landline).
And one add-on costs nothing: the state DNC and complainers scrub. Set dncOther: true and every lookup also screens state do-not-call registries covering 40 states, refreshed weekly, plus a national list of roughly 700,000 documented DNC complainers. It returns a coverage flag too, so a number in one of the 11 states we don’t cover reads as “not covered” instead of falsely reading as clear. Free means free here: it never adds a credit.
The math on a real list
Say you’re scrubbing 10,000 US numbers a month before a calling campaign, and you want line type, carrier, live status, litigator screening, and state DNC.
- CheckThatPhone: base lookup plus litigator is 2 credits per number, DNC rides along free. 20,000 credits lands around $60 on the 10K plan with overage, or a flat $100 on the 100K plan with room to run five times that volume.
- Twilio: line type ($80) plus line status ($70) gets you to $150, with no litigator or DNC screen available. You’d bolt on a separate scrub vendor and a second integration.
- Trestle: $150 for validation, litigator add-on priced on request on top of that.
- Numverify: $14.99, and you’d learn which numbers are formatted correctly. Nothing about whether they’re alive, litigious, or on a registry.
- IPQS: a conversation with their sales team.
That gap isn’t a rounding error, and it compounds monthly.
Which one should you pick?
Honest recommendations, since different jobs want different tools:
- Global form validation, compliance irrelevant: Numverify or numlookupapi.com. Cheap, wide coverage, does the job.
- You’re already deep in the Twilio ecosystem: Twilio Lookup’s free format check plus Line Type Intelligence is a reasonable path, just price out the add-on stack before committing.
- Telecom routing and LRN at scale: Telnyx, easily.
- Phone data as part of a broader fraud program with budget for a sales process: IPQS.
- US/Canada outbound calling or texting, where lists decay and TCPA exposure is real: this is the job CheckThatPhone was built for, and it’s the only option on this page where validation, litigator screening, and a DNC scrub come out of a single API call.
The free tier is 500 lookups a month, enough to run a real slice of your list through and compare the results against whatever you’re using now. The full response schema is in the docs if you want to see every field before you sign up for anything.