Free skip tracing — what it is, and what it costs you
There genuinely are free ways to find an owner's phone number. They are worth knowing about, and they are worth knowing the shape of.
What free actually gets you
County assessor and treasurer portals will tell you who owns a parcel and often whether the taxes are paid, for nothing. That is real, public, and the source underneath most paid products.
Free people-search sites will return phone numbers attached to a name. What they typically will not tell you is whether the number is a mobile, whether it is current, or whether the person it belongs to is a TCPA litigator.
Trial credits from paid platforms are the third route. They work exactly once and are best spent testing a market rather than running a campaign.
Where the cost moves to
With free sources the money is replaced by time and by risk. Time, because assembling a few hundred usable rows one owner at a time is an evening per hundred. Risk, because the scrubbing step — the one that keeps a litigator off your dial list — is the part free sources do not do.
Every file runs against litigator and DNC data before delivery, and known TCPA litigators are removed outright rather than flagged.
We keep cell and wireless numbers only. Landlines and VoIP are dropped before you are billed, so the count you pay for is the count you can actually text.
At our rates a thousand-record county file costs less than most people's weekly coffee budget, which is the real comparison: not free versus paid, but an evening versus an order form.
When free is the right call
Testing whether a market is worth anything at all: use the county portal. You do not need a traced list to learn that a county has four tax-delinquent properties in it.
Chasing one specific house you already care about: free lookups are fine, and a paid single lookup is fine too.
Running an actual campaign: the free route stops being free at about the point it starts working, because the volume it needs is the volume it cannot produce.
Questions people ask
Is it legal to call numbers from a free people-search site?
Calling and texting are governed by TCPA and by your state's rules regardless of where the number came from. The relevant difference is that a scrubbed list has had known litigators and DNC entries removed and an unscrubbed one has not.
Do you have a free trial?
No. There is a 100-record minimum on pay-as-you-go and no subscription required to place that order, which is the closest honest equivalent — a small real order rather than a sample we picked.
Why not just buy a cheap list off a marketplace?
Because a list with no provenance is usually one that has been sold many times and traced badly. The two things worth paying for are freshness and the scrub, and neither is visible in a price.
Other comparisons
Pick a county and a list type, or send your own addresses. Mobile numbers only, litigator and DNC scrubbed, and anything the county does not hold is credited back.