Question 1

What does pingutil do?

Accepted Answer

Given an email or domain, pingutil returns a category (free, disposable, educational, government, ISP, role-based, or company) and structured company information for company domains.

Question 2

Is pingutil free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. pingutil is a free community project. Sign in to issue an API key and use it on /v1/lookup.

Question 3

How does pingutil detect disposable email domains?

Accepted Answer

Disposable detection is backed by the upstream community blocklist at github.com/disposable-email-domains, refreshed weekly into Cloudflare KV.

Question 4

Where does the company data come from?

Accepted Answer

Company information is produced by Gemini 2.5 with Google Search grounding so every fact is corroborated by live web sources, validated against a strict schema, then cached in Cloudflare D1. The exact URLs Gemini consulted are returned in meta.grounding_sources for transparency.

Question 5

How does pingutil compare to Clearbit, Apollo, or ZoomInfo?

Accepted Answer

pingutil focuses on the lookup itself — category + structured company info from any email or domain — and is free for community use. Vendors like Clearbit and Apollo bundle data with B2B sales tooling at much higher price points; pingutil is the pragmatic choice when you need the JSON, not the platform.

Question 6

What are common use cases?

Accepted Answer

Signup quality gating (block disposable inboxes, route role-based addresses), CRM enrichment on the fly, outbound list cleaning, account-type detection, fraud and abuse scoring, and free-tier email validation.