Free vs paid skip tracing: what you actually get
Free skip tracing works for one owner at a time: the county assessor gives you the owner's name and mailing address, and a free people-search site may show a phone number. For a whole list, "free" tracing usually means it is included in a paid monthly plan. Skipmatch has no free tier; it prices each list per matched record.
Key facts
- Price
- a flat $0.03 a record at any list size from 50 to 100,000 records.
- Unit
- Priced per matched record.
- Minimum order
- 50 records
- Minimum charge
- Minimum charge $0.50 when any record matches.
- Single search
- Single search: $0.10, charged only on a match, paid from prepaid credit ($10 minimum top-up).
- Prepaid credit
- Prepaid credit expires 12 months after your last credit purchase, single search or credit-paid list, and unused credit is refundable on request within 90 days of purchase.
- Free tool
- Check your list free at /tools/skip-trace-csv-checker. Check columns, split addresses and download a fixed CSV in your browser before tracing at $0.03 a record. No account needed.
- Subscription
- None. A list order is paid for on its own by card or prepaid credit.
- Max per order
- 100,000 rows or 50 MB per file
- Output
- Up to 10 phones per owner, each with its line type (mobile, landline or VoIP), plus emails where found
- Sources
- 3 core providers: idiCORE, Enformion and Delvepoint
- Not for
- FCRA uses: credit, insurance, employment or tenant screening
- Prices last changed
- Last updated
Short answer
If you need one owner, you do not need to pay anyone. Public records name the owner, and a free people-search site often has a number for that name. If you need a list of owners, someone pays for the lookups: you pay a monthly plan that includes a tracing allowance, a membership that adds free skips, or a price per record with no plan.
So the useful question is not free or paid but which way of paying fits how often you trace and how many owners at a time. The table below sets out what "free" covers in each case, and the cost table further down works each one out at 100, 1,000 and 10,000 records from each company's own published prices.
| Method | What "free" covers | What you pay | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| County assessor or tax office | Searching the parcel record: owner name, mailing address, parcel number. Usually no phone number. | Usually nothing to search online | Confirming who owns a property and where they get mail |
| Free people-search site | A search by name, often with partial details | Nothing to search; full reports are often paid | One owner, or a handful |
| Tracing included in a platform plan | Traces up to the plan's monthly allowance | A monthly plan: PropStream from $129 (Essentials plus an add-on) or Pro $199, REsimpli from $299, PropertyRadar from $119, DealMachine from $99 a seat | Investors who already build their lists on that platform |
| Membership allowance (DataSkip) | 100 free skips a day, up to 3,000 a month | $9.99 a month; 4¢ per hit past the allowance | Small batches traced steadily through the month |
| Per record, no plan (Skipmatch) | Nothing is free. Seeing the price of a list before you pay is. | Per matched record: $0.03 (any list size) | Lists of 50 to 100,000 owners, run when you need them |
Free single lookups
For one owner, free is the right answer, and Skipmatch is not. Skipmatch has no free tier and is bulk only: orders start at 50 records. If you have a single property, look the owner up yourself in two steps.
1. The county assessor or tax office
Every county keeps a public record of who owns each parcel, because it sends the property tax bill. Search the property address or parcel number on the county assessor's or tax office's website, or its GIS parcel map. The record usually shows the owner's name, the mailing address the tax bill goes to, and the parcel number. It usually does not show a phone number or an email, because owners do not give those to the assessor.
2. A free people-search site
People-search sites compile public records and commercial data into profiles you search by name. Search the owner's name with the city and state of the mailing address from the county record, then confirm it is the right person by matching that address in their history. Many sites show some details free and keep full phone numbers behind a paid report or subscription. This guide names no site, because none has been tested here.
Free lookups cost time rather than money: one owner per search, each checked by hand. That is fine for a few names and slow for a few hundred. The step-by-step version is in how to find a property owner's phone number.
"Free" with a plan
When a platform says skip tracing is free, it usually means free inside a paid plan, up to an allowance. Here is what five of them publish, quoted from each company's own pages as of Sept 2026.
PropStream
PropStream states the rule on two pages, in two wordings, and each is quoted with its own page. Its skip tracing page (propstream.com/skip-tracing (opens in a new tab)) says skip tracing is "free with the Pro or Elite plan, or when you add Lead Automator to your Essentials plan". Its pricing page (propstream.com/pricing (opens in a new tab)) says: Plans at $99, $199 and $699 a month ($81, $165 and $583 a month billed annually). Skip tracing is 12¢ per contact on Essentials, free through PropStream Connect (an add-on from $30 a month on Essentials, included on Pro and Elite); additional skip tracing on Pro and Elite is 10¢ per contact. Both were checked .
In plain terms: tracing is included with the $199 Pro plan, or with the $99 Essentials plan plus an add-on the pricing page (propstream.com/pricing (opens in a new tab)) prices from $30 a month, which makes the cheapest published route to included tracing from $129 a month. On Essentials alone every contact costs 12¢. The two pages name the Essentials add-on differently (Lead Automator on one, PropStream Connect on the other), so check the pricing page for your account. Skipmatch vs PropStream works the costs out in detail.
REsimpli
$299, $899 or $2,199 a month billed monthly ($249, $699 or $1,799 billed annually). Each plan includes 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 skip tracing credits a month that do not roll over; additional skip tracing is $0.15 per record. 14-day free trial. (resimpli.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), resimpli.com/features/skip-tracing (opens in a new tab), checked .)
In plain terms: tracing is included, as credits inside a plan that starts at $299 a month billed monthly. Unused credits do not carry over, so a quiet month still costs the full plan.
PropertyRadar
Plans at $119, $249 and $599 a month billed monthly ($99, $199 and $549 a month prepaid annually). Phones and emails are capped at 250, 500 or 2,500 a month by plan, then 8¢, 6¢ or 4¢ per contact. Included contacts do not roll over. 5-day free trial. (propertyradar.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked .)
In plain terms: the plan includes a monthly cap on phones and emails, from 250 to 2,500 depending on the plan, and every contact past the cap is charged. PropertyRadar counts contacts, not owners.
DealMachine
Basic $99 a seat a month with 10,000 data credits a seat; Pro $149 a seat a month with 20,000; Scale $599 a month for a 100,000-record package with 10 seats. No separate per-record price is published. (dealmachine.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), dealmachine.com/features/skip-tracing (opens in a new tab), checked .)
In plain terms: tracing draws on the data credits that come with each seat. Because no separate per-record price is published (dealmachine.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked ), this guide does not work out a per-record figure for it.
DataSkip membership
A flat 4¢ per hit at any volume from a prepaid balance. A $9.99 a month membership adds 100 free skips a day, up to 3,000 a month. (dataskip.io/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked .)
In plain terms: the free skips are a membership allowance, and the membership is a subscription too. The allowance is per day, so 1,000 records use 10 days of it; past the month's 3,000, hits are 4¢ each. Skipmatch vs DataSkip compares the two in full.
A plan earns its fee when you use the rest of the platform, such as list building, property research or a CRM, and trace close to the allowance every month. If you only need the tracing, skip tracing with no subscription sets the plans against paying per record at monthly volumes.
Paying per record
The other way to pay is per list, with no plan: you upload a file, see its price, and pay for that order only. Skipmatch has no subscription or monthly allowance. Lists can be paid by card or optional prepaid credit, which also pays for single searches. Prepaid credit expires 12 months after your last credit purchase, single search or credit-paid list, and unused credit is refundable on request within 90 days of purchase.
- Price: $0.03 a record at any list size. The whole list is priced at that one rate, and the total is shown before you pay.
- Limits: 50 to 100,000 records per CSV. Minimum charge $0.50 when any record matches.
- What comes back: your file with your own columns unchanged, up to 10 phone numbers per owner, each labelled mobile, landline or VoIP, emails where they exist, and a match flag on every row.
- What is free: the sample result file, and pricing your own list before you pay.
The cost calculator prices any row count, and the pricing page has the full ladder.
Cost at 100, 1,000 and 10,000 records by method
One month, one list, worked from each company's published prices as of Sept 2026. A plan's fee is the same whether you use its allowance or not; a "from" figure is a plan whose published terms do not give a total for the list.
| Method | How it is counted | 100 records | 1,000 records | 10,000 records |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| County record + free people-search site | By hand, one owner per search | 100 searches by hand | 1,000 searches by hand | 10,000 searches by hand |
| PropStream Essentials, 12¢ per contact | $99 a month plus 12¢ per contact | $111.00 | $219.00 | $1,299.00 |
| PropStream Essentials + add-on, tracing included | $99 a month plus an add-on from $30 a month | from $129.00 | from $129.00 | from $129.00 |
| PropStream Pro, tracing included | $199 a month; 10¢ per additional contact | from $199.00 | from $199.00 | from $199.00 |
| REsimpli, entry plan | $299 a month with 10,000 credits, one per record | $299.00 | $299.00 | $299.00 |
| PropertyRadar | Whichever plan costs least at that size, one contact per record | $119.00 ($119 plan) | $179.00 ($119 plan) | $819.00 ($249 plan) |
| DealMachine Basic, one seat | $99 a month; no separate per-record price published | from $99.00 | from $99.00 | from $99.00 |
| DataSkip, per hit | 4¢ per hit, every record a hit | $4.00 | $40.00 | $400.00 |
| DataSkip with membership | $9.99 a month; free skips used first | $9.99 | $9.99 | $289.99 |
| Skipmatch | Per matched record, no plan; the whole list at its tier | $3.00 ($0.03) | $30.00 ($0.03) | $300.00 ($0.03) |
Among the methods whose published terms give a total for the list, the ones that come to less than Skipmatch are: at 100 records, none of them; at 1,000 records, DataSkip with its membership; at 10,000 records, REsimpli's entry plan and DataSkip with its membership. The "from" rows cannot be totalled, but some start below Skipmatch's price before any tracing is counted: at 10,000 records, PropStream Essentials with the add-on, PropStream Pro and DealMachine. Their full cost for the list is not published. The DataSkip membership figure at 10,000 records uses the month's 3,000 free skips (30 days of the daily allowance) and prices the other 7,000 at 4¢ a hit, which is $280.00 plus the membership. Where another option is lower for your list and your month, use it. What the table shows is that none of the ways to trace a whole list is free.
Is free less accurate?
No honest number answers that, and this guide does not give one. Free describes the price, not the data: free people-search sites and paid tracing services both draw on public records and commercial data, and no independent test we know of runs them on the same records. Skipmatch publishes no hit rate of its own, and this page quotes no other company's.
Three reasons a single number would mislead:
- Different counts. A hit, a match and a right-party contact are different things, and services count them differently.
- Different lists. Results depend on the input: a current mailing address, a person's name rather than an LLC, and how old the list is.
- Different units. A price per hit, per contact, per credit or per record changes what a "result" means before any data is compared.
What does differ in practice is the work. A free site is one owner per search, checked by hand, often with some numbers behind a paid report. A bulk trace returns the whole file at once; Skipmatch labels every phone it returns mobile, landline or VoIP. The number that tells you something is your own: run the same records through each option and count the calls that reach the owner. How to judge a skip tracing hit rate sets out a fair test.
Questions
How can I skip trace for free?
Is PropStream skip tracing really free?
Is there a free skip tracing service for real estate investors?
Is free skip tracing accurate?
How much does paid skip tracing cost per record?
Price your list before you pay for it.
Create an account, upload the file, and see your total before you pay. Records with no phone and no email are never charged.