The standard playbook for a BDR or founder-led sales effort goes roughly like this: get a list of target domains, enrich them with a paid tool (Clearbit, Apollo, ZoomInfo), filter for buyer fit, find email addresses, add a hiring-signal layer for intent, and start outreach. Each step is served by a different SaaS, and each step costs money. Apollo starts at $59/user/month for the barest plan. ZoomInfo is five figures annually. Clearbit — since the HubSpot acquisition — is no longer free and the pricing is custom-quote.
For an early-stage team with a budget in the hundreds per month rather than thousands, none of this works. You end up either paying for one tool badly (under-provisioned, rate-limited, missing data) or you do it manually, which burns founder time on a task that shouldn't require founder attention.
The free-stack alternative is real, and it works. Aggregate company data from eight public sources (WHOIS, DNS, SSL, GitHub, tech headers, robots/sitemap, npm, favicon/OG). Extract emails from the website. Detect hiring signals from job-board scrapes and careers-page parsing. Rank the result by buyer intent. Three actors, a ranking function, ~100 lines of Python. Cost: roughly $30-50 for a 100-domain run, vs. $500-2000 on the paid-stack equivalent.
