Does Phisherman offer a free tier?

Yes, Phisherman provides a permanent free plan that includes 100 API lookups per minute and a total of 100,000 lookups per month, suitable for personal projects and small-scale applications.

What is the starting price for Phisherman's paid plans?

The starting paid plan for Phisherman is the Pro Plan, which costs $5 per month. It offers increased limits of 500 API lookups per minute and 500,000 lookups per month.

How does Phisherman's pricing scale?

Phisherman's pricing scales based on the volume of API lookups and the rate limits. As your application requires more lookups per minute or per month, you can upgrade to higher-tier plans like Business or Enterprise, which offer increased capacities for a higher monthly fee.

Are there any hidden fees with Phisherman pricing?

Phisherman's pricing is transparently listed on their official pricing page. The primary cost is the monthly subscription fee based on your chosen plan, which covers the API lookup limits. There are no reported hidden fees for standard usage.

Can I upgrade or downgrade my Phisherman plan?

Yes, users can typically upgrade or downgrade their Phisherman subscription plan as their usage needs change. Details on managing subscriptions are usually available through their account dashboard or support documentation.

What happens if I exceed my API lookup limits on the free tier?

If you exceed the API lookup limits on the free tier, your requests will likely be rate-limited or temporarily blocked until the next billing cycle or minute window. To avoid interruptions, you would need to upgrade to a paid plan that accommodates your usage volume.

How does Phisherman's pricing compare to VirusTotal?

Phisherman generally offers more accessible initial paid tiers and a generous free tier for its focused phishing detection service. VirusTotal provides a broader, more comprehensive analysis from multiple sources, and its paid enterprise APIs can be more expensive, especially for very high volumes, reflecting its extensive data aggregation.

Phisherman Pricing: Plans, Tiers, and Real-World Costs (2026)

Pricing overview

Phisherman employs a tiered pricing structure primarily based on the volume of API lookups and the rate limits applied to those lookups. This model is designed to provide scalability for developers and organizations integrating phishing detection into their applications, particularly Discord bots and other online community moderation tools. The service offers a permanent free tier, which allows users to test and deploy small-scale projects without an initial financial commitment. As usage requirements grow, users can transition to paid plans that increase the available lookups per minute and per month, along with access to additional features or support levels, as detailed on the Phisherman pricing page.

The core of Phisherman's offering is its API, which enables real-time scanning of URLs against a database of known phishing sites. This functionality is crucial for maintaining security in user-generated content environments. The pricing structure is engineered to align costs with the operational scale of the consuming application, ensuring that smaller projects can operate freely while larger, more demanding deployments incur costs proportional to their resource consumption. This approach is common among API providers in the security and moderation space, where usage directly correlates with the value delivered, such as VirusTotal's API pricing structure which also scales with request volume.

Plans and tiers

Phisherman's pricing is organized into several distinct plans, each offering different levels of API access and features. The primary differentiating factors between tiers are the maximum number of API lookups allowed per minute and the total lookups permitted per month. These limits directly impact the speed and scale at which an application can perform phishing checks.

Plan	Price (USD/month)	API Lookups/Minute	API Lookups/Month	Best For
Free Plan	$0	100	100,000	Personal projects, small Discord bots, evaluation
Pro Plan	$5	500	500,000	Growing Discord communities, moderate-traffic applications
Business Plan	$10	1,000	1,000,000	Larger communities, medium-sized platforms, increased moderation needs
Enterprise Plan	Custom	Custom	Custom	Large-scale platforms, high-volume enterprise applications, dedicated support

Each paid plan builds upon the capabilities of the free tier, increasing the capacity for API calls. The Enterprise Plan is tailored for organizations with specific, large-scale requirements that exceed the standard tiered offerings and typically involves direct consultation with Phisherman for customized solutions, as is common for enterprise-level API management platforms.

Free tier and limits

Phisherman provides a robust free tier designed to support developers in the initial stages of their projects or for smaller-scale applications. The free plan offers:

100 API lookups per minute: This rate limit allows for real-time scanning of URLs, suitable for applications that do not experience extremely high concurrent requests.
100,000 API lookups per month: This monthly quota is generous enough for many personal Discord bots, small community moderation tools, or for extensive testing and development of integrations.

This free tier is permanently available and does not require a credit card to sign up, making it accessible for experimentation and non-commercial use cases. Developers can utilize the Phisherman API reference to integrate the service into their applications using various SDKs, including Node.js, Python, and Go, without immediate financial commitment. The free tier aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers looking to add phishing detection capabilities.

Real-world cost examples

Understanding Phisherman's pricing in practical scenarios helps developers budget and choose the appropriate plan. These examples illustrate how different usage patterns translate into monthly costs.

Example 1: Small Discord Bot for a Gaming Community

Scenario: A Discord bot deployed in a gaming server with approximately 500 active members. The bot checks links posted in general chat channels for phishing attempts. On average, users post 10-15 links per hour during peak times, and fewer during off-peak.
Estimated Usage: Approximately 500-700 lookups per day, totaling around 15,000-21,000 lookups per month. The peak rate rarely exceeds 50 lookups per minute.
Cost: This usage falls well within the Free Plan limits (100,000 lookups/month and 100 lookups/minute). The monthly cost would be $0.

Example 2: Moderation Tool for a Medium-Sized Online Forum

Scenario: An online forum with 5,000 daily active users integrates Phisherman to scan all user-submitted URLs in posts and comments. The forum experiences bursts of activity, especially after new content is published.
Estimated Usage: An average of 2,000-3,000 lookups per day, with occasional spikes to 500 lookups within a few minutes. This equates to roughly 60,000-90,000 lookups per month. While monthly lookups are within the free tier, the rate limit might be a concern during peak times.
Cost: To ensure consistent performance during peak activity and avoid hitting the 100 lookups/minute rate limit, the Pro Plan ($5/month) would be appropriate. This plan offers 500 lookups/minute and 500,000 lookups/month, providing ample headroom. The monthly cost would be $5.

Example 3: Large Social Platform with High-Volume Content

Scenario: A social platform with 50,000 daily active users needs to scan all shared links in real-time to prevent the spread of phishing. The platform generates a high volume of user-submitted content, leading to continuous API requests.
Estimated Usage: An average of 30,000-40,000 lookups per day, often exceeding 500 lookups per minute during peak hours. Total monthly lookups could reach 900,000 to 1,200,000.
Cost: This usage exceeds the Pro Plan's monthly lookup limit and frequently pushes past its rate limit. The Business Plan ($10/month) offers 1,000 lookups/minute and 1,000,000 lookups/month, which would cover the estimated volume. If usage consistently exceeds 1 million lookups/month, an Enterprise Plan would be necessary. For this scenario, the monthly cost would be $10, potentially escalating to a custom Enterprise quote if volume consistently exceeds the 1 million monthly lookup limit.

How the pricing compares

Phisherman's pricing model is competitive within the market for phishing detection and URL scanning services. When compared to alternatives, several factors come into play, including the generosity of the free tier, the cost per lookup, and the specific features offered.

StopPhish: Similar to Phisherman, StopPhish focuses on real-time phishing detection for Discord and other platforms. Its pricing structure is also tiered, often with a free tier and escalating costs based on usage. Direct comparison requires examining specific lookup rates and monthly quotas, as these can vary.
URLScan.io: URLScan.io provides a more comprehensive URL analysis service, including screenshots, DOM content, and network requests, in addition to threat intelligence. While it offers a free tier for public scans, private or automated API access for higher volumes typically involves paid plans that might be priced higher due to the depth of analysis provided. Its pricing model often reflects the computational resources required for detailed forensic analysis beyond simple blacklist lookups.
VirusTotal: VirusTotal, a well-established service, aggregates results from numerous antivirus engines and URL scanners. Its API pricing is also usage-based, with a free public API for non-commercial use with strict rate limits, and paid enterprise APIs for commercial and high-volume use. VirusTotal's comprehensive nature means its paid tiers can be more expensive, especially for very high volumes, given the extensive data aggregation it performs.

Phisherman positions itself as a specialized solution primarily focused on rapid phishing detection, particularly optimized for community moderation and Discord bot integration. Its free tier and initial paid plans are generally more accessible for developers and smaller communities compared to broader security platforms that offer more extensive, and thus potentially more costly, analysis capabilities. The cost-effectiveness for Phisherman often comes from its focused feature set and optimized performance for its niche.