Data and search

Quick fix

1. Check which action you ran. A profile enrichment behaves differently from an email or phone search. See the table below.
2. Count how many contacts you submitted. If it was more than a couple of hundred, results may have arrived too late to be saved; try again in smaller batches.
3. Check whether the same contacts were submitted more than once. There is no duplicate guard; each submission is charged.
4. Check that the contacts actually had a LinkedIn profile address. Contacts without one are skipped before anything is charged.
5. If the numbers still do not add up, note how many contacts you sent and how many came back, and contact support.

Didn't work? Contact Reply support; the team can check your account directly.

Symptom

You ran enrichment on a group of contacts. The credit balance dropped by roughly the number you submitted, but the contacts show no new email addresses, phone numbers or job details, or far fewer than you were charged for.

What each action costs, and whether a miss is refunded

Two things follow from this table that catch people out.

A phone number costs three times what a profile enrichment costs. If you enrich a large list with the phone option switched on, the balance moves much faster than the contact count suggests.

All of these draw from the same balance, with one exception: email validation has a balance of its own. So a profile enrichment run and an email search run compete for the same credits, and a validation run does not.

The five reasons credits go and data does not arrive

1. The action charges for the attempt, not the result

This is by far the most common answer, and it applies only to enriching from a LinkedIn profile.

When you enrich a contact from their LinkedIn profile, the credit is committed as soon as the lookup runs. If the profile is thin, or the provider has nothing on that person, you are still charged. The credit is only returned when the contact was skipped before the lookup happened; for example because the profile address was missing or malformed.

Email search, phone search and email-based enrichment behave the opposite way: a miss is refunded.

How to recognize it: the balance dropped by close to the number of contacts submitted, and the contacts that came back empty are real people with real but sparse profiles.

What to do: nothing repairs the spend, but you can avoid repeating it. Enrichment fills gaps far more reliably on contacts that already have a complete-looking profile. Running it across an entire list of unknown quality is the expensive way to find out which ones are enrichable.

2. A large batch's results arrived too late to be recorded

Enrichment runs in the background and writes results against a short-lived progress record. On large batches, the work can outlast that record. When it does, the results are discarded, nothing is written to the contacts, and the credits are neither committed nor returned; they sit reserved until the reservation lapses on its own.

How to recognize it: you submitted a few hundred contacts or more; nothing at all came back; the balance looks wrong immediately afterwards and then partly corrects itself later.

What to do: re-run in smaller batches. If the balance has not corrected itself after an hour, contact support with the number of contacts and roughly when you ran it.

3. The same batch was submitted more than once

There is no check that stops the same contacts being enriched twice. Each submission holds and charges its own credits. A double click, a retried page, or two people working the same list will each be paid for.

How to recognize it: the balance dropped by a multiple of the contact count.

What to do: before re-running a batch that looked like it failed, check whether the contacts already have the data. A run that appeared to fail may have succeeded.

4. An address was found and then discarded

When Reply cannot find a real address for a contact, it can generate a placeholder one. If an email search returns one of those placeholders, it is discarded and the contact is reported as not found.

How to recognize it: the contact still has no usable address, and the result was reported as a miss.

What to do: nothing; this case is refunded, and discarding the placeholder is the correct behaviour. It is listed here because it explains why a search can report "not found" for a contact that the provider did technically return something for.

5. Some contacts were never enriched at all, and were not charged

These are skipped before anything is spent, which is why the numbers can look wrong in the other direction:

• the contact has no LinkedIn profile address – profile enrichment cannot start
• the address is malformed
• the profile is private or no longer exists

How to recognize it: fewer credits were spent than contacts submitted.

What to do: nothing. This is working as intended.

Why a found address can be out of date

When an email address has been found before, it can be returned again rather than searched for afresh, and there is no age limit on how old that earlier result may be. So a lookup can return an address that was correct when it was first found and is not correct now.

This is also why two lookups for the same person can cost a credit each and return the same answer; the credit pays for the lookup either way.

What to do: if an address looks stale and mail to it bounces, treat the bounce as the signal rather than re-running the lookup, which will most likely return the same value. Validation is the cheaper check.

What enrichment does not cost

A LinkedIn step in a sequence enriches for free. When Reply runs a LinkedIn step that visits a contact's profile, it collects the extra profile data it sees along the way at no credit cost. If your contacts are going through LinkedIn steps anyway, you may not need to enrich them separately.

What is not guaranteed

Enrichment fills gaps; it does not promise to fill them. No action guarantees a result, and coverage varies widely by region, seniority and how public a person's profile is. A few profile details are not collected at all yet, pending support from the data provider.

FAQ

Can I get a refund for a run that found nothing?

Where the action refunds a miss, it happens automatically and needs no request. Where it charges for the attempt, the spend stands. If the numbers do not match either behaviour, support can look at the run.

Why did my balance drop more than the number of contacts?

Most likely the phone option was on; a phone number is three credits against one for a profile. Check which options were selected on the run.

Does email validation use the same credits?

No. Email validation has its own balance. Everything else on this page shares one.

Still stuck? Contact Reply support

If these steps didn't solve the problem, the Reply support team can look at your account directly. Open the Reply Help Center and send the team a message.

To get an answer faster, include:

• which enrichment action you ran, and which options were selected
• how many contacts you submitted and how many came back with data
• roughly when you ran it, and your timezone
• whether the same contacts had been enriched before

Don't send passwords, API keys, or access tokens.

Related

• Why did enrichment change data I did not want changed? – the overwrite rules
• Why did a search return too few contacts?
• Limits – what consumes credits

Build with Reply

• REST API: Email validation – estimate the cost of a run before scheduling it
• MCP: docs.reply.io/mcp – read and change enrichment settings from an assistant