D&B Hoovers Database: What It Costs and What to Check First

D&B Hoovers is Dun & Bradstreet's company database for sales, marketing and research teams. Stanford's business library describes it as a web platform with current information on both public and private companies around the globe, including financials, SWOT reports and IT strategy (Stanford Libraries).

It does two jobs. It helps you research accounts, and it builds lists you can download. Trust the research job far more than the list job.

My answer up front: Hoovers is a documented way to research a company before you contact it, and unproven as a source of contacts until the file passes your checks. Budget from a written quote only, and run every export through four checks before a single email leaves your domain.

Where did Hoovers come from, and what do people use it for?

Dun & Bradstreet bought Hoover's in 2003 and relaunched the platform as D&B Hoovers in 2017 (UF Business Library).

Stanford's guide shows how people use it day to day:

• Account research. You open a company, choose the data fields you want and get a custom company report as a PDF. A separate triggers view tracks corporate events such as mergers, acquisitions and executive changes.
• List building. You set filters in a side panel, view the results, and download companies or contacts into an Excel spreadsheet.

The research job is where a company database earns its fee. If you know a target just replaced its CFO or bought a competitor, you have a reason to write that no generic list will ever give you.

The list job is where I see outbound campaigns break, and most of this article is about that.

One disclosure first. My team writes and sends cold email and LinkedIn campaigns, and we build custom lead lists for some clients. We do not sell a database subscription. Every product fact below carries its source.

How much does a D&B subscription really cost?

No independent source prices Hoovers on its own. The best public evidence comes from Vendr, which publishes figures based on 110 D&B purchases made through its platform (Vendr). Those figures blend every D&B product a buyer signed for. Read them as the size of a typical D&B relationship, not the price of one Hoovers seat.

Here are the figures I could trace to a named source, labeled by where they come from:

Entry-plan and enterprise figures on rival vendors' pages cite nothing and sit next to a pitch for their own product, so I left them out.

Quoted Hoovers prices differ widely for four reasons:

1. Blended products. Vendr's median includes buyers who signed for several D&B products, not only Hoovers.
2. Seats and volume. A quote moves with the number of users and the amount of company and contact data they pull.
3. Add-ons. Extra modules sit on top of the base license and change the total.
4. Motive. Vendors who sell a competing product benefit when Hoovers looks expensive, so unsourced figures on their pages deserve no weight.

The decision rule: the only price that counts is a written quote from D&B for your exact seats and data volume. If a figure has no source and no buyer behind it, keep it out of your spreadsheet.

What do the renewal terms commit you to?

D&B's own Essentials page for the UK and Ireland sets out the rules (Dun & Bradstreet):

• The license renews automatically each month or each year, depending on your term.
• At renewal, D&B may raise the fee by up to 5% of the fee you pay at that point.
• To cancel, you must give at least 14 business days' notice before the renewal.

That page covers one product in one market. Larger D&B contracts are negotiated, so the order form you sign is what binds you. Read its renewal clause before you sign.

Vendr's buyer comments show how the uplift works in practice. They are anonymous and undated:

• One buyer describes a 6% price increase every year.
• Another negotiated the uplift down from 5% to 3%.
• A third won a 3% cap, but only by agreeing to keep auto-renewal switched on.

A lower cap tied to automatic renewal only helps if you are sure you will still want the product next year.

Vendr also gives a few negotiation levers:

• Timing. December, January and June are the best months to buy. D&B's fiscal year ends on December 31, so year-end is when a rep has the most reason to close.
• Contract size. Vendr estimates the redline threshold at $50k. In other words, changes to D&B's standard paper become realistic around that contract value.
• Payment. Buyers report Net 30 and Net 60 payment terms (the invoice is due 30 or 60 days after it is issued), plus annual billing.

On the day you sign, add two entries to your calendar: the renewal date, and the last day you can still give notice before it. On the Essentials terms above, that is 14 business days earlier. Use whatever your contract sets instead if it differs. This is not legal advice.

Is Hoovers a good source for a cold email or LinkedIn list?

Not straight out of the export. Use it to research accounts, and treat every downloaded row as unchecked until it passes the four checks below.

I ask for the spreadsheet before I read a single subject line whenever a founder tells me nobody answers his cold emails. That file is where most campaigns die, through wrong titles, wrong company sizes and addresses nobody checked. Copy cannot save a bad list or a weak sending setup.

Inbox providers take the same view. Google's sender guidelines for Gmail say: "Don't purchase email addresses from other companies" (Gmail Help). The same guidelines tell senders to keep spam rates below 0.3%. They cover mail sent to personal Gmail accounts, yet they show how mailbox providers judge bulk senders.

Treat the download as a starting file. Fix the list first. Then write the email.

I have no campaign data from Hoovers, so I will not claim it works for sending. When my team builds a client list, I pick from Apollo, UpLead, ZoomInfo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Hoovers is not on that shortlist.

How should you check a Hoovers export before you send anything?

Run these four checks in order. Each one shrinks the file before the next.

1. Start from your clients. Open your client list first, past and current, and search for companies that resemble them before setting any filter.
2. Strip the generic titles. Remove Assistant, Manager and Associate. Then search with the exact titles of the people who signed your past deals. After that, sort what is left by title. If fewer than half of the unique titles belong to people who can sign without asking anyone, stop and rebuild the filters.
3. Verify every address. Put the full export through NeverBounce or DeBounce, then mail just the addresses that come back valid. I do not let a campaign go out unless its bounce rate stays under 0.5%. High bounce rates can get your sending domain flagged, and later campaigns from it may then land in spam.
4. Spot-check by hand. Pull a random sample of rows and check two things: is the company still trading, and does the person still hold that role? HubSpot, citing Marketing Sherpa research, puts B2B data decay at 2.1% per month, about 22.5% a year, so a file is older than it looks. If several rows fail, re-pull it or drop that segment.

The full method to audit a lead list goes further than these four checks.

When should you pick Hoovers, and when should you pick something else?

Prices below come from each vendor's own pricing page, unless another source is named.

Two rules decide most cases:

• If your market is small, depth per account matters more than record count. When you can name most of your possible buyers, a research tool that explains each company is worth more than a bigger file.
• If you need tens of thousands of verified contacts for volume sending, Stanford's guide warns that library downloads are limited and points anyone needing thousands of records elsewhere. Our campaigns book 30-35 B2B sales calls a month. That takes at least 10,000 people reached every month. Before sending, I need 20,000 contacts or more. That is the minimum for the first list.

At that volume, the export limit decides whether a tool can keep up. D&B's own administrator guide says exporting company and contact data is tied to credits, with a set number per seat. Get your credit count in writing first. Then use a tool designed for list building, and compare options on cost per verified contact.

For the wider field of list-building tools, see prospecting databases compared.

What does data decay mean for any database you pay for?

Every export starts aging the day you download it. People change jobs, companies merge, inboxes close. I keep rebuilding lists instead of trusting an old file for exactly this reason.

Re-verify before every new campaign, even if the file came from the same subscription last quarter. A subscription may refresh the records inside the platform. It does nothing for the copy already sitting in your drive. Research with Hoovers. Send only what survives the four checks.

How fast B2B records go stale is covered in the data decay rate traced to its source.

Holding a Hoovers export or a renewal notice and unsure what to do with it? Book a call and bring ten rows. I will tell you what I would check first.