Free Website Visitor Identification Tools and Their Limits

Several visitor identification tools offer a free plan, but each caps it tightly. Leadfeeder is described with 100 identified companies a month, Warmly with 500 visitors, and BusinessMCP with a free plan that shows the first three visiting companies each month. Free is useful for testing a tool, not for running a sales team.

What each free plan is reported to include

The details below come from the vendors’ pages and from vendor-authored comparison pages. Where a figure comes from a competitor’s summary, we say so. Free tiers change often, so confirm before you rely on one.

Tool	Free tier as described	Notable limits
Leadfeeder	$0, 100 identified companies a month, 7-day data retention	Short retention; cookie-based tracking, with consent required in the EU
Warmly	$0, 500 de-anonymized visitors a month	Limited intent data, no automation (per a competitor’s page)
BusinessMCP	Free forever: 300 unique visitors, 2,000 events, company visits for the first 3 companies a month	Company enrichment of every visitor starts on the $19 Starter plan
RB2B	Free tier with no contact data	Not useful for outreach on its own

The BusinessMCP row is taken directly from its pricing page, which also notes that data export in CSV, API and JSON is available on every plan, including free. That is unusual enough to be worth checking in any tool you test, because export is what lets you leave.

Different caps measure different things

A cap of 100 identified companies and a cap of 500 visitors are not comparable. One counts successes and the other counts traffic. A site with 5,000 monthly visitors and a 25 percent match rate would produce around 1,250 identified visits, so a 100-company cap is reached quickly, while a 300-visitor cap is hit by traffic volume long before the match rate matters.

Key takeaway: read the unit of the cap before you read the number. “Identified companies” and “visitors” describe different bottlenecks.

How to use a free plan well

Treat the free tier as an experiment with a question and a deadline.

1. Install the script on your highest-intent pages first, such as pricing, demo and comparison pages.
2. Run for at least a week so you see a full business cycle.
3. Record how many companies are named and how many are in your target market.
4. Hand-check ten of them against form fills or known customers.
5. Decide: upgrade, switch, or stay free.

You can run two free plans side by side, which is the cheapest way to compare tools. Our article on testing a visitor identification tool gives a fuller method, and BusinessMCP’s Warmly comparison suggests the same parallel-run idea for evaluating a switch.

What free plans cannot do

Do not expect free plans to cover the following.

• Outreach. Automated sequences and AI SDRs sit on paid plans. BusinessMCP’s AI SDR page lists it on the Scale plan at $199 a month.
• Full enrichment. Contact and firmographic detail is usually gated.
• Long history. Seven-day retention, as on Leadfeeder’s free plan, makes trend analysis impossible.
• Support and security reviews. Enterprise buyers need DPAs and audit logs that free tiers rarely provide.

When free is enough

A pre-revenue startup with a few hundred visitors a month may never outgrow a free plan. A consultant who wants to see which firms read a case study can live on one. The moment you add a sales process, a free plan becomes the discovery phase for a paid one, and that is fine.

If you are replacing Warmly specifically, read our guides to a cheap Warmly alternative and to Warmly pricing to see which paid step comes next.

Privacy applies to free tools too

A free tool still processes visitor data, which means a privacy policy disclosure and, in the EU, a lawful basis. The BusinessMCP GDPR guide describes legitimate interest as the typical basis for company-level identification and says cookies or similar identifiers on a device generally need consent under ePrivacy rules. Our GDPR summary covers this. Using a free plan does not change your obligations, and this is not legal advice.

Exit planning for a free trial

Before you install anything, decide what a successful test would look like and what would make you stop. Write the threshold down: for example, “at least 40 identified companies in a week, of which at least 10 are in our target list”. If the test misses it, remove the script and move on. If it passes, ask what the next tier costs and whether billing is monthly. Tools that give you export on the free plan make this decision easy because the data you collected comes with you.

A realistic two-week free test

Here is a simple plan using only free tiers. In week one, install one free tool on your pricing, demo and comparison pages. At the end of the week, export the list and mark which companies fit your target market. In week two, add a second free tool from a different vendor on the same pages. Compare the lists: where they agree, you can be fairly confident, and where they disagree, hand-check a few.

What do you learn from this? First, whether your traffic produces enough company matches to be useful at all. A site whose visitors are mostly consumers or mobile users may produce almost nothing, and it is better to learn that for free. Second, whether the output fits how your team works. A list in a dashboard is different from an alert in Slack or a record in a CRM. Third, how quickly you hit the cap. If a free tier runs out in three days, you know the traffic is high enough to justify a paid plan, and you can estimate which one.

Free tiers and what they signal

A free plan is also a signal about the vendor’s strategy. A low cap with short retention is designed to convert you quickly. A generous cap with a narrow feature set is designed to build a user base. Neither is wrong, but you should know which you are in. Look at what the first paid step costs and whether it is billed monthly. In the cases we reviewed, BusinessMCP’s first paid step is $19 a month on a no-contract basis according to its pricing page, while Leadfeeder’s is $99 a month billed annually according to a vendor-authored comparison. That difference in the first upgrade matters more than the free caps.

If you are building a shortlist of Warmly replacements, the page comparing BusinessMCP with Warmly shows one vendor’s view of where a free-to-paid path can lead, and our software guide lists what to look for before you pay.