Finding a contact by number over the API now searches everyone
A contact search on the developer API used to look only at your newest few hundred contacts, so a real customer's number could come back empty. It now searches your whole contact book.
Released 20 August 2026
If you build on our API, searching for a customer by their mobile number now finds them however long ago they were added.
What's new
- The search covers your whole contact book — asking for a number, a name, an email or an @username used to sift only the page of newest contacts the request returned, so on a busy workspace a search for a customer added months ago came back empty. It now runs across every contact you have.
- An empty answer finally means what it says — nothing coming back used to be ambiguous: it might mean no such contact, or simply that the person was too far down the list to be looked at. Now it means nobody matched, so your integration can act on it.
- Filtering by tag works the same way — narrowing a search to a tag reaches your whole contact book too, not just the most recent arrivals.
- Masked numbers keep their rule — if your workspace hides customer numbers on the API, a complete number still finds its contact, because knowing the number is the point. A partial one still finds nothing, so a search can never be used to guess the hidden digits.
- Nothing to change on your side — the request and the response are unchanged. The same call you make today simply finds the people it was missing.
Search from GET /v1/contacts with the number in q. Manage keys under Developers in your workspace settings.