PropStream Alternative — Skip the $99–$699/Month Tiers

What is Ava Data?

Ava Data is a PI-grade skip tracing API and data intelligence platform built for real estate investors, outbound sales teams, and developers. Every account includes the web dashboard, List Builder for quick-list property pulls (absentee owner, pre-foreclosure, tax-default, vacant, and more), bulk CSV processing, and the public REST API — no separate developer plan or approval tier required beyond standard account enablement.

Pricing is per match: 1 credit ($0.02) for a phone-only Standard Lookup, 2 credits ($0.04) for phone + email, and 10 credits ($0.20) for a Deep Search that adds address history, demographic attributes, and the related-persons graph. Credits are only charged when a match is returned. The $9/month plan includes 100 credits and covers API use as well — there is no separate API plan.

What Ava Data does not do: property comps, rehab-cost estimation, or MLS-adjacent market analysis. It's the contact layer, not the research layer.

What is PropStream?

PropStream is a property-data and research platform used widely by real estate investors and agents for comps, ownership and lien history, equity estimates, and rehab-cost tools, alongside list building and marketing features. As of their June 2025 pricing update, PropStream sells three tiers: Essentials ($99/month), Pro ($199/month), and Elite ($699/month), each with monthly record-save/export caps and, on higher tiers, more team seats — with a lower effective rate if billed annually. That same update introduced a bundled skip-tracing allotment on plans that include their Lead Automator feature, folding some contact-lookup cost into the subscription rather than charging fully separately.

PropStream offers a 7-day free trial that converts to a paid subscription automatically at the end of the trial unless canceled — a detail worth flagging since several public complaint boards describe difficulty completing cancellation before the auto-charge, particularly around weekend trial expirations when support isn't staffed. PropStream is a Stewart Information Services (NYSE: STC) company and, since a July 2025 acquisition, now also owns BatchLeads and BatchDialer.

How Ava Data Knows the Numbers Are Good

There's a harder question than price: how do you know the numbers are good? Most skip tracing services never find out what happens after they hand you a phone number. Ava Data does — through partnerships with high-volume dialing networks placing over 100 million calls a month, Ava Data sees real connect signals and tests its data head-to-head against major data vendors. Every outcome gets scored: right-person connects, numbers that don't connect, wrong numbers. Those signals feed a custom ranking layer that orders every contact's phone numbers by real-world connect performance — so the number most likely to answer is first on your list.

These are aggregate network connect signals — no customer lists or uploaded records are ever shared, sold, or used.

Side-by-Side Comparison

The Fine-Print Math: A Skip-Trace-Only Workflow

If property research isn't why you're paying — if you already have a list source (your own pulls, a wholesaler relationship, a prior export) and just need current contact data — the subscription-vs-per-match gap compounds fast:

• Ava Data: Trace 1,000 records at 2¢/match, pay only for what matches — $20 at the very most, less whatever share doesn't match, and $0 in months you don't trace anything.
• PropStream Essentials: $99/month minimum, whether you trace 10 records or 10,000, whether it's a busy month or a slow one.

Over a year, PropStream's Essentials tier alone is $1,188 in fixed cost before a single record is traced. Ava Data's $9/month plan (100 credits included) plus match-based overage totals a fraction of that for teams whose volume is uneven month to month — the classic pattern for solo investors and small teams who aren't tracing on a steady weekly cadence.

This isn't an argument that PropStream is overpriced for what it does — its research tools are a genuinely different product. It's an argument that paying a property-research subscription price purely to get a contact-data feature is the expensive way to solve a narrower problem.

When PropStream Is the Right Choice

If comps, rehab-cost estimation, equity analysis, and ownership/lien history are core to your workflow — if you're evaluating deals as much as sourcing them — PropStream's all-in-one research platform does work Ava Data was never built to do. Paying a flat monthly rate also makes sense if your usage is steady and high-volume enough that a subscription beats per-match pricing on raw math.

Ava Data is the better fit when the job is narrower: you already know what property you're chasing, or you're getting your lists from List Builder or elsewhere, and the bottleneck is turning a name and address into a phone number that answers — without paying for comps tools that sit unused.

Common Objections, Answered Honestly

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Ava Data cheaper than PropStream?

For a skip-tracing-only workflow, generally yes. PropStream's published tiers run $99–$699/month regardless of usage. Ava Data is $9/month with 100 credits included — one plan for dashboard and API — then 2¢ per matched phone record. PropStream includes property research tools Ava Data doesn't offer, which is the tradeoff behind the price gap.

Does Ava Data have an API like PropStream?

Ava Data includes a public REST API with every account. PropStream does not publish a self-serve developer API for building custom integrations. If programmatic access to skip tracing or list data is a requirement, Ava Data is the more direct option of the two.

Did PropStream acquire BatchLeads?

Yes. PropStream, a Stewart Information Services company, acquired BatchLeads and BatchDialer in July 2025. The two products continue to operate as separate logins and subscriptions as of this writing, but now share ownership and increasingly overlapping data infrastructure.

Can I use Ava Data for the same quick-lists PropStream offers?

Ava Data's List Builder ships quick-list filters for the core off-market segments — absentee owner, pre-foreclosure, tax-default, vacant, tired landlord, and more. See the full set at /lists/. It doesn't include PropStream's comps or rehab-estimate tools.

Further reading: List Builder Quick-Lists · Skip Tracing API · Bulk Skip Tracing · BatchLeads Alternative · Skip Tracing Cost Guide · Absentee Owner · How to Find the Owner of a Property