Case Study
Why Appsmith Chose Crustdata Over ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Clay for Live Company and People Data
Company
Appsmith
use case
Product Data Layer
company overview
Appsmith is an open-source application builder platform that helps companies build internal applications and customer-facing websites. Their CEO, Abhishek Nayak, led the evaluation of data providers for a new product feature that auto-populates websites with live company and people information.
scale
Series B, open-source
Appsmith's website builder needed to auto-populate company and people data for users building personal and business websites. The data had to come from social media and professional profiles, and it had to be fresh. Neither building in-house nor relying on existing vendors could solve the problem.
Appsmith's engineering team initially attempted to build their own data collection infrastructure for the website builder feature.
The team ran into persistent reliability issues that made the system unsuitable for a production product feature where users expect consistent results
Data quality was inconsistent across sources, with no reliable way to ensure the information surfacing on users' websites was accurate and up to date
Engineering time spent maintaining and debugging data pipelines was time not spent building the website builder itself
Appsmith already paid for ZoomInfo and Clay for sales automation, making them the default candidates for the product use case.
Both vendors had freshness issues, serving data that lagged behind reality on social media and professional profiles where information changes frequently
Their APIs were not designed for the velocity a product feature requires, where every user action triggers a data request that needs to return current information
Even evaluating how to apply these vendors' APIs to Appsmith's use case was slow, requiring multiple interactions and engineering involvement before the team could understand whether the product would work
The website builder pulled data from social media and professional profiles, a category where information changes constantly.
Users expect their generated websites to reflect their current role, current company, and current professional context, not a cached record from weeks or months ago
Out-of-date data surfacing on a user's website would undermine trust in the product and create a poor first experience with the feature
Across the four providers Appsmith evaluated, including ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Clay, only one could deliver the freshness their product demanded
Crustdata gave Appsmith the live data layer their website builder needed: fresh company and people information delivered through developer-friendly APIs that shipped in hours instead of weeks.
Appsmith's website builder now pulls live company data (250+ datapoints) and people data (90+ datapoints) directly through Crustdata's enrichment APIs whenever a user creates a website
Every API request returns current information sourced from social media and professional profiles, so the data on a user's website reflects reality at the time of generation
The enrichment APIs replaced both the failed in-house system and the out-of-date data Appsmith's existing vendors provided, consolidating two failed approaches into one working integration
Crustdata's API follows a direct request-response model that matched how Appsmith's engineers already build product features, with no multi-step retrieval or ticket-based workflows
The API documentation was clear enough that engineers could evaluate, test, and integrate without the drawn-out discovery process other vendors required
What the team budgeted as a one-week integration project shipped in half a day because the API surface was straightforward and well-documented
On the first sales call, Crustdata answered every technical question and tested the API live, so Appsmith's CEO could hand engineers a verified integration path rather than an open-ended evaluation
No engineering involvement was required during the buying process, unlike the experience with other vendors where the team had to loop in engineers just to understand whether the product would work
A dedicated support channel means questions get resolved directly rather than through ticketed queues, giving the product team faster answers when integrating new data features
Crustdata's data quality, API design, and support model delivered measurable returns across engineering time, vendor spend, and product adoption.
The integration that was deprioritized because of an assumed one-week timeline shipped in under four hours once the engineer started, reclaiming four and a half engineering days on a single integration
For a startup where every sprint counts, that recovered time went directly back to building Appsmith's core product features rather than plumbing external data pipelines
The speed also changes how the team prioritizes future features that depend on external data, since integrations with Crustdata no longer carry a week-long engineering tax
After seeing Crustdata's data quality and developer experience firsthand, Appsmith is actively replacing ZoomInfo with Crustdata for their sales automation stack as well, eliminating a redundant vendor subscription
One API now serves both the product use case (website builder) and the planned sales use case, removing the cost of maintaining separate vendor relationships, contracts, and integrations for each
Engineering overhead drops as the team manages one data provider instead of three, freeing maintenance cycles that translate directly into more time spent on revenue-generating product work
Appsmith's website builder now auto-populates company and people information from live sources, which means users build websites faster because they skip the manual step of copying data from social media profiles
A feature that saves users time on every website they create increases adoption of the website builder, strengthening Appsmith's product differentiation and driving user retention in a competitive application builder market
Fresh, accurate data surfacing on generated websites builds user trust in the product, reducing the risk that a poor first experience with out-of-date information drives users away from the feature before they see its value