Skip tracing API

A skip tracing API lets you do programmatically what a manual trace does one person at a time: start from the details you already hold — a name and stale address, a dead phone number, a bouncing email — and search consumer records for current contact information. If your team runs skip traces as part of collections, process serving, real-estate outreach, or asset recovery, an API turns hours of portal searches into a request inside your own workflow.

What the CoverFi API does

CoverFi exposes its records pipeline — 250M+ US consumers with address history, phones, emails, and name variants — as a credit-metered REST API:

• Search by any permitted combination: name + state, name + ZIP, name + date of birth, or a phone or email alone.
• Two-step flow: a search returns a list of candidate people with permanent GD- record IDs; fetching one record's full profile is a second, separately-metered call. You only pay to open the profiles you actually need.
• Labeled match tiers: when an exact search misses, the engine widens one criterion at a time — former names, nicknames, transposed name order, compound-surname spellings, relaxed date of birth, nearby metro areas — and every row says exactly which tier produced it. You always know whether you're looking at an exact contact match or a broadened guess.
• Confidence scores: each result carries a 0–100 match-confidence signal, so your code can auto-accept strong matches and queue weak ones for human review.
• Household lookups: a people-at-address endpoint inverts the search — give it an address, get the people on file at it.

Quick start

Create an API key in the dashboard, then:

curl "https://coverfi.com/api/orgs/{org_id}/records?q=Jane%20Rivera&state=TX" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..."

import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://coverfi.com/api/orgs/{org_id}/records",
    params={"phone": "5125550142"},
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer sk_live_..."},
)
for person in resp.json()["items"]:
    print(person["full_name"], person["state"], person["match_confidence"])

The full API reference covers authentication, every endpoint, and masking semantics; the same content ships as raw markdown at /docs/api.md for coding agents, plus an OpenAPI spec. Every error the API can return is documented in the error reference.

Pricing that fits batch work

There is no subscription and no per-seat fee. Searches cost 1 credit, full profiles 1 credit, household lookups 2 credits, and prepaid packs start at $25 for 50 credits (pricing). Three properties matter for skip-tracing workloads specifically:

• Zero-result searches are refunded automatically. Tracing works through lists with unavoidable misses; you don't pay for them.
• Re-running a search is free, and re-fetching a profile within ten minutes of paying for it is free — idempotent retries don't double-bill.
• Credits are shared org-wide and never expire, so a monthly trace batch and an always-on integration draw from the same pool.

Honest results, by design

Skip-trace data is only as good as its provenance signals. CoverFi returns them instead of hiding them: every profile shows when each phone, email, and address was last observed in the source data; results that matched through a relaxed tier are labeled with that tier; and a response-level banner states which of your typed criteria were not enforced. When the data disagrees with what you typed — a contact number now on file under a different name, for instance — the API says so rather than silently ranking it as a match.

CoverFi is an informational lookup service, not a consumer reporting agency: API access requires a permitted-use attestation, and FCRA-regulated eligibility uses are prohibited.