TheirStack alternative for job boards: compare job data costs and workflows

Are you buying job inventory or company intelligence?

A job board needs useful vacancies: titles, employer names, descriptions, locations and a route to apply. A sales team may instead ask which accounts use a technology, have a relevant hiring signal or fit a target company profile. Both workflows can start with a job posting, but the data product being purchased is different.

TheirStack documents job, company and technographics APIs. Its pricing separates application company credits from API credits. That distinction matters: an account-research package should not be compared directly with a returned-job allowance. First decide whether your integration needs job inventory, company research or both.

The Jobs API is a strong fit for the inventory case. You can search US and Canadian jobs, fetch full descriptions and maintain records through documented lifecycle endpoints. The buying case is a focused integration and a lower subscription at the matched allowance below. We are the publisher of this comparison, so the recommendation is conditional on your trial results.

• TheirStack API documentation
• The Jobs API search documentation

What does a job-only price comparison show?

The table compares published monthly USD subscriptions checked October 23, 2026. It assumes TheirStack API credits are used for job retrieval, not company lookups. It excludes discounts, taxes, custom agreements and additional operations. It is not a claim that the two products provide identical data.

At the 20,000-job tier, the difference is $2,280 over twelve identical monthly subscriptions. That is a budget comparison, not a guarantee about migration savings. Include engineering time, any required company enrichment and any differences in usable coverage before presenting a business case.

Check the current credit rules for the exact endpoints you use. TheirStack documents one API credit per job and three per company record. Treat a workflow mixing those objects as a separate estimate. A job-only table does not establish that The Jobs API is a substitute for a company-intelligence workflow.

• TheirStack current pricing
• TheirStack credit-model explanation
• Our current subscriptions

How does lower data cost change a job-board budget?

Consider an illustrative specialist board with an 11,000-record first import, 3,000 new returned records, 2,000 billable update records and 2,000 detail or verification reads. That totals 18,000 returned records. It leaves 2,000 records of headroom in a 20,000-job allowance, assuming its chosen endpoints and request count fit the plan.

A $190 monthly subscription difference could fund other product work, but the arithmetic alone does not tell you where to spend it. Compare it with your actual costs for hosting, search, moderation and applicant acquisition. Those costs differ by business; they are not included in either provider allowance.

The example is especially sensitive to synchronization. Our /v1/changes stream covers a country, not just the niche represented by a search. If your board processes that entire stream, it can read far more than 2,000 changes. Model a supported filtered feed design or a larger plan rather than using the illustrative workload as a forecast.

Distinguish launch usage from a steady month. Initial imports, retries after an incident and deliberate backfills create bursts. A buffer that looks generous in a quiet month may disappear when you rebuild an index. Quota planning should include recovery as a normal operating need.

• How our usage is counted
• Select a sync strategy

What should a Canadian or US board verify first?

Start with the employers that define your niche. A board for Quebec construction trades needs a different employer sample from a US software board. Include the languages, locations and types of employer your audience expects. Make the sample before looking at a provider’s newest records so that a convenient result set cannot choose the test for you.

Record the original requisition identifier, application URL and observation time for each reference vacancy. Compare a complete employer inventory where practical. Where you only inspected part of a board, call it a spot check. Count matching vacancies separately from duplicate locations or copies across publishing channels.

Inspect the details applicants need to make a decision. Does the description retain qualifications, work arrangements and application instructions? Is a salary hourly or annual? Does remote mean anywhere, a named country or a commute to a particular office? Preserve employer wording and distinguish an unavailable fact from a value inferred by your own software.

The Jobs API exposes full text and HTML descriptions and available source fields. That makes it useful when your product needs to render and search substantive postings. It does not mean every optional field exists for every employer. A trial should verify availability in the sources you intend to use.

• A repeatable provider scorecard
• Job details and source fields
• Remote eligibility examples

How should you compare webhooks and polling?

TheirStack advertises webhooks for new jobs, closed jobs and new companies. The Jobs API documents polling through its change and feed endpoints. A push workflow and a polling workflow can both support a maintained product, but they place different responsibilities on the consuming application.

With polling, store a checkpoint only after processing the batch durably. Replaying a batch should update the same stored records rather than duplicate them. With any push integration, design for redelivery, delayed messages and unavailable receivers according to the provider’s documented behavior. In both cases, keep a reconciliation strategy for gaps.

Our separate expired-ID feed is available from the 20,000-job plan and the modified-jobs feed from the 50,000-job plan. The ordered changes endpoint is available on every plan. Choose on the basis of event semantics, scope, volume and your application design, rather than assuming that every interface called an update feed behaves the same way.

• TheirStack pricing and webhook features
• Our ordered change stream

When does TheirStack remain the better choice?

Retain a company-intelligence platform when the company is the main object in your workflow. Technology research, account selection and enrichment can be central to a sales product even if they contribute little to a public job board. Evaluate those capabilities on their own merits instead of assigning them zero value because a job-only comparison excludes them.

Likewise, verify geographic requirements before switching. Our customer product focuses on Canada and the United States. A worldwide requirement should not be reduced to a North American price table. Write down the countries and company fields that are non-negotiable, and reject an alternative that cannot supply them.

A split architecture can make sense: a dedicated jobs service for inventory and a separate provider for the company information you genuinely use. It can also increase operational work and costs. Price the joins, record matching and maintenance explicitly before deciding that two smaller subscriptions are better than one.

How do you test an alternative before committing?

Build a small comparison notebook with the same queries, dates and acceptance rules for both providers. Keep source payloads or permitted samples and separate provider namespaces. Do not merge records simply because the employer names and titles are similar; confirm the original vacancy relationship.

End the evaluation with three numbers you can defend: the share of reference vacancies found, the share of reviewed records usable in your product, and projected monthly usage under your chosen sync design. Add a list of missing employers and fields. This creates a useful decision memo, rather than a table of headline catalogue sizes.

Use The Jobs API’s seven-day trial for a bounded sample: 500 jobs and 50 requests, no card. Reserve calls for detail inspection and integration checks. If your essential requirements pass, the job-only subscription saving is a concrete reason to move; if they do not, keep the evidence and ask for a specific coverage review.