I run a small dev shop in Latvia. I was spending hours every day manually finding leads using Apollo, AI chats, prompt engineering, manual searching. It worked, but it was exhausting. Then I realized something. All these platforms are charging $50-200/mo to access data that governments literally publish for free. Business registries in the Baltics, Companies House in the UK, they’re all public. So I stopped paying and built my own pipeline: Scrapes official government business registries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, UK) Enriches leads with contact info through web search AI composes personalized emails per recipient Sends through my CRM automatically GDPR compliant because it only uses data companies published themselves Build time: about 30 hours across 5 modules. Cost in paid tools: €0. It runs locally on my Mac. First campaign went out this morning. 62 emails. The system keeps feeding new leads while I do other work. I genuinely don’t understand why people pay $800/mo for Instantly + Apollo + ZoomInfo when the underlying data is free. Am I oversimplifying this? What am I not seeing? Happy to answer questions about the build. submitted by /u/LegitimateOwl873
Originally posted by u/LegitimateOwl873 on r/ClaudeCode