Buying a Sales List (2026): 8 Services Scored on Cost per Record, Freshness & Lock-in

"If I'm going to buy a sales list, which provider is actually best?" — it's a question we get a lot, but the answer changes completely depending on what you're selling. This article compares eight services from Japan and abroad with hard numbers and lays out how to choose by industry and by company size.

Eight services at a glance

1. Musubu (Baseconnect Inc.) — the go-to domestic company database

A database of 8 million Japanese companies. You can segment by industry, size, revenue, listed/unlisted status, and more, and export on a monthly subscription. The effective cost per record is a reasonable ¥120-200.

• Pros: covers Japanese corporations comprehensively, rich SFA / MA integrations, includes financial data
• Cons: sole proprietors (hair salons, restaurants, etc.) are out of scope, and social accounts aren't captured
• Best suited for: B2B sales to mid-size and larger corporations — SaaS, consulting, recruiting, and the like

2. Sansan / FORCAS — for the enterprise

A comprehensive solution combining business-card OCR with a corporate database, built around company-wide CRM rollout. It's in the several-million-yen-per-year range — the class of product a large company's sales department adopts department by department.

• Pros: integrates with your existing business-card and CRM data, with top-tier data accuracy
• Cons: overkill for small and mid-size businesses — over ¥1M when you add setup fees to the annual cost
• Best suited for: organizations with 50+ sales reps running SFA / MA company-wide

3. Apollo.io — built overseas, strong LinkedIn integration

A US-born SaaS with a B2B contact database of 270 million records worldwide and powerful LinkedIn integration. It starts at $49/mo (about ¥7,000), but its coverage of Japanese companies is lower than in Europe and North America (60-70% of domestic corporations).

• Pros: rich overseas-company data, flexible monthly billing, excellent LinkedIn-based filters
• Cons: low coverage of Japanese companies' phone numbers and emails, English-only UI
• Best suited for: selling to overseas SaaS companies, global recruiting, startups already expanded into English-speaking markets

We compare it in detail in our article on whether Apollo works for Japanese companies.

4. Hunter.io — email-focused

Specialized in domain-based bulk email extraction — "give me every email of people working at this domain." $49/mo for 500 searches.

• Pros: high email capture rate, fast bulk capture by specified domain
• Cons: no filtering by industry or region, not a company database (= it assumes you've already decided on your target companies)
• Best suited for: ABM (account-based marketing), reaching decision-makers at a specific set of companies

5. List brokers — one-time-purchase, industry-specific lists

One-time-purchase products like "10,000 hair salons nationwide = ¥300,000." There are many, from small industry-specialist operators to large DB-specialist firms.

• Pros: high accuracy for industry-specialist lists, no subscription since it's a one-time purchase
• Cons: never updated, so 10-20% becomes closed-business data within 6 months, and email capture rates are low
• Best suited for: small agencies that sell into just one industry, campaigns that use a list once and discard it

6. Crowdsourced outsourcing — for custom requirements

On platforms like Lancers or CrowdWorks, you commission "500 records of [industry] in [prefecture], delivered as a spreadsheet." ¥300-800 per record, 3-7 business days to deliver.

• Pros: handles fully custom requirements, and you can specify fields no SaaS offers (e.g. whether they take after-hours inquiries)
• Cons: quality varies by worker, no same-day turnaround because of the lead time, higher cost
• Best suited for: one-off, unusual requirements (e.g. "restaurants open after 10 p.m.")

7. Scraping vendors — not recommended

Vendors touting "we auto-capture from Google Maps and deliver." Dirt cheap at ¥50-200 per record, but almost certainly a Google Maps Terms of Service violation.

• Pros: cheap, fast turnaround
• Cons: you end up receiving terms-violating data as a deliverable — a legal gray area. There are precedents of being sued for "improper acquisition" by a prospect you pitched using the delivered data
• Why we don't recommend it: short-term cost is low, but your company carries the legal liability

8. bacotto — specialized in local B2B

Using the Google Places API plus official-site analysis, ¥4-15 per record. The cheapest, fastest option when your targets are "sole proprietors and brick-and-mortar businesses listed on Google Maps" — hair salons, restaurants, dental clinics, professional services, real estate, and the like.

• Pros: dramatically low cost per record, captures Instagram and LINE Official accounts too, closed-business filter built in, Japanese UI
• Cons: can't produce decision-maker lists for large corporations (Musubu / Sansan are a better fit), overseas companies are out of scope
• Best suited for: sales to businesses listed on Google Maps — hair salons, restaurants, dental clinics, therapy clinics, professional services, real estate, auto repair shops, and so on

A flowchart for choosing by use case

Cost estimate: total for capturing 100 records, 12 times over one year

The decisive question: should you buy a "sales list" at all?

Having compared all this — buying a list every month isn't necessarily the right answer.

• A list is for the first touch of cold outreach. Ideally your core accounts come through other channels (referrals, SEO, trade shows)
• List-driven sales typically converts at 0.5-2%. That's 1-2 appointments per 100 records
• Work backward from that conversion rate and your LTV to decide upfront how much you can pay per record. With bacotto, if you sell a ¥10,000 service at a 0.5% conversion rate, you can afford up to ¥50 per record = 1,000 records a month

Conclusion: recommended service by use case