Village vs Affinity

Village's data page is unusually candid about its own composition. Of the edges it counts, 613M are co-worker links (34%), 569M are role links (32%), 490M are alumni links (27%) and 133M are direct ties (7%). The other 93% is overlap assembled from public work and education records: two people at the same 40-person startup in 2019, two alumni of the same school program, two names attached to the same funding round. That's the reason Village can answer a question about a company nobody on your team has ever emailed, and it's also the reason a path it returns may be a stranger who happens to share a line of history with your colleague.

Affinity holds the opposite kind of material. Its first-party signal is what the firm's own licensed seats did: 25 billion emails and calendar events captured across 3,300+ firms, by its own count, scored on recency and frequency. Every edge is an interaction that happened. Nothing in it is inferred except the inferred network connections feature on the Scale tier, and nothing in it exists for a company the firm has never touched, which is the trade.

The practical read is this. If the question is "who can get me into a company we have no relationship with", an inferred graph has more to say, and Village is the product that was built to say it. If the question is "which partner here owns this relationship and how warm is it", an inferred graph is noise, and Affinity is the product that answers from the record.

Village is bought the way software is bought now. Free is $0 with 100 credits a month and 10 results per AI search. Pro is $79 a month billed monthly, $49 a month billed annually. Business is $149 a month, $119 annually, and the third-degree team network runs $19 per collaborator per month on top. Credits meter the interesting actions: about 6 for an AI search, 5 for warm intro paths to a person, 1 to reveal an email, roughly 50 to run a project agent. Packs are 1,000 credits for $25, 5,000 for $100.

Affinity publishes prices and still sells through people. Essential is $2,000 per user per year, Scale is $2,300 and adds AI Chat, the notetaker, the Ascend agents and the MCP server, Advanced is $2,700 and adds the enrichment sources and packaged integrations, Enterprise is custom. There is no free tier and no self-serve signup. A ten-person investment team on Scale is $23,000 a year before operations seats, which is a normal line item for a fund and an impossible one for anybody else.

The gap at list price is large, and the metering is the part that closes some of it. An Affinity seat is flat however hard it's used. A Village team that runs project agents daily will buy credit packs, and a heavy month can cost more than the plan. Anyone comparing the two on price should price their own volume, not the headline.

Village keeps going outward. Lists, unlimited autopilots, AI intro sequences, lead screening, exports, 500+ integrations on Business and a browser extension that finds paths while you browse. The product assumes you found a target and want a path, and then want to send something. It's shaped like outbound.

Affinity keeps going inward. The path lands on a record, the record sits in a pipeline with stages, notes, reminders and reporting the partners read on Monday, and the enrichment sources fill in the company page next to the stage. Ascend adds agents for meeting prep, warm intros and data updates on Scale and up. The product assumes the relationship is the beginning of a process the firm will run for months.

Neither shape is better. A team trying to get forty first meetings this quarter is buying sequencing. A fund tracking four hundred live opportunities is buying stages. Choosing on graph size alone skips the question that decides it.

Both of these are team products with graphs that are bigger than your own, and both are priced for teams. A good number of people who land on this comparison don't have a team to pool or a fund to buy for them. They want to know who they already know, and who among those people can make one introduction.

That is a narrower job, and it's a different product. Happenstance searches the accounts one person connects, or that a free group pools, and asks the question in plain English. The pre-built global graph and the outreach sequences are Village's; the deal pipeline and the notes are Affinity's; Happenstance is the search layer beside either, and it is free, so finding out whether the search is the only part you needed costs nothing. The longer versions of both comparisons are on the Affinity page.

Some funds run both, and the split is clean: Affinity holds the pipeline and the firm record, Village is where the sourcing team goes when the target is cold. Nothing connects them automatically. Village lists CRM and ATS integrations and 500+ integrations on Business, and Affinity puts unlimited API access on Enterprise, but neither vendor names the other on its published pages, so treat it as two tools and a copy and paste.

Moving in either direction is asymmetric. Leaving Village costs you a subscription and whatever lists you exported. Leaving Affinity means migrating a system of record, which is an implementation project, and the firm-wide capture that made the graph valuable stops the day the seats do.