Security and privacy decision
1Lookup
A competent developer can replicate basic phone/email/IP validation and a billing-lite service in about a week, but cannot easily reproduce 1Lookup's direct FCC/carrier data access, breadth of enrichment products, and enterprise-grade performance/support.
Visit website↗$99/mo
$1,188/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$50/mo5 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Accept an identifier (phone, email, or IP) → run validation/enrichment checks (syntax, MX/SMTP, port/geolocation, carrier/HLR where available) → return risk/confidence score and structured metadata.
What it still won’t have
- Direct FCC & carrier data access (daily-updated carrier/FCC feeds)
- Single universal credit system and bundled multi-product catalog
- Enterprise SLA, dedicated CSM and priority support
- Scale-tested <300ms validation performance and global coverage out of the box
- Advanced enrichment products (firmographics, skip-trace, mobile finder) and unified billing
What remains hard
- Proprietary data
The only verification platform with direct FCC access. Built for businesses like yours.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted data verification microservice using Node.js + Express, PostgreSQL, and a worker queue (Bull or similar). Implement REST endpoints: /validate/email, /validate/phone, /lookup/ip. In scope: phone normalization via libphonenumber, email syntax+MX lookup, optional SMTP mailbox liveness probe (configurable with concurrency limits), IP geolocation via a pluggable provider (require the operator to supply an API key), risk scoring composed from the above signals, request logging to Postgres, and a simple web dashboard showing usage and recent lookups. Out of scope: direct FCC/ carrier HLR access, enterprise SLA, advanced enrichment products (firmographics, skip-trace), audio transcription. Require error handling for timeouts and provider failures, input validation, retries with backoff, unit and integration tests, Dockerfiles for service and Postgres, and a README with deployment steps and cost estimates.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score55
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official product1Lookup - Phone, Email & IP Validation + Enrichment API
- official pricing1Lookup Pricing
- official product1Lookup Use Cases
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
