Apollo is renting you a graveyard. You can do better for 29 €.

Every founder I know in the seed-to-Series-A bracket has the same toolchain. LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Apollo. Lusha or Hunter for the emails. Maybe Clay for enrichment. By the time you've set it up, you're paying 600–800 € / month before you've sent a single email.

That stack works. I used it for three years at my previous company. But it has two structural problems that never go away.

Problem 1: you're renting a snapshot, not a stream

Apollo and ZoomInfo are huge databases of companies that exist somewhere. The data is real, but it has been aggregated and re-aggregated, and the same row has been bought by every competitor you have. The database refreshes, but the freshness curve is brutal. A "new" contact in Apollo today might have been in there for 18 months.

You're effectively renting access to a graveyard. You compete on sequence quality and timing — but timing is mostly luck when the underlying signal is six quarters old.

Problem 2: founders pay for quantity, not signal

The implicit promise is "we'll give you 10 000 contacts". But you don't want 10 000 contacts. You want 50 founders this month who would actually book a call. The 10 000 number is there because the spreadsheet ROI calculator at the back of the pitch deck only works if you assume a 0.5 % response rate.

That maths is real. But it means you spend a third of your week in Apollo filters trying to find the 50 inside the 10 000. That work is the actual job, and you are doing it for them.

The AutoLeads pitch for founders

We built AutoLeads as the tool we wanted at our last company. The contract is simpler:

• You give us keywords (your ICP's public-facing description) and target places (cities, countries, regions).
• We deliver a fresh CSV every Monday, capped to your tier's monthly quota. 25 leads (29 €), 100 leads (99 €), 1 000 leads (499 €).
• Every lead has a quality score, a contact channel, and a domain we've never delivered to your team before.
• If we can't find enough leads in your target market, we pause your sub and prorate-refund the difference. You only pay for delivered leads.

The numbers we kept hearing from founders

We met one of our beta users at a founder dinner in Paris last winter. He runs a B2B SaaS at the Series-A stage. He showed us his Notion with the previous year's outbound spend: a five-figure annual bill for Apollo + Sales Navigator + Lusha, one SDR, low-thousands of emails sent, eleven closed customers from outbound. Cost per closed deal worked out to roughly the price of a used scooter.

When he sketched out the same volume with AutoLeads at the Growth tier, the line-item difference was an order of magnitude. Reply rates in his test campaign were a touch higher, which he attributed to the leads having a recent contact channel and a quality score his SDR could lead with. He was the second user to tell us this; we've since heard the same shape from a handful more.

We're not pretending that's apples-to-apples — Apollo does enrichment AutoLeads does not. But for founders whose outbound motion is "small business in a specific geo", the Apollo enrichment isn't the value driver. Freshness is.

When AutoLeads is not the right tool

I'll be honest about the cases where you should keep your Apollo seat:

• You sell to Fortune 500. The right buyer is one named exec at one named account. Apollo's enrichment graph is better than ours and will be for a long time.
• You need precise tech-stack triggers. "Companies that just adopted Snowflake" is the kind of intent signal Clay pipelines do well. We don't.
• You sell to remote-only software companies. AutoLeads is best on businesses that have a public location and a public contact channel. If your ICP lives entirely on LinkedIn, our web-crawl approach won't outperform a Sales Nav search.

How founders typically start

1. Free tier (10 leads, no card). Pick the tightest version of your ICP, run it on your home city, look at the 10 leads.
2. If they're reasonable, go to Growth (99 €). 100 leads / month is enough for one founder to manually cold-email 25 a week.
3. Hire an SDR at the Scale tier (499 €, 1 000 leads). One SDR + AutoLeads at 1 000 leads/month is the same throughput as most outbound shops doing 800–1 200 €/month on Apollo + Lusha.

FAQ

Do you replace Apollo entirely?

For local-business outbound: yes. For enterprise outbound: no, you keep Apollo and use AutoLeads as a freshness layer for the SMB segment of your funnel.

Can I cancel anytime?

Yes. Stripe portal in one click. If your campaigns exhaust mid-month we prorate-refund the unused portion automatically.

How does HubSpot integration work?

Connect once, every Monday morning the new leads upsert as contacts and companies. Use the website quality score as a custom property to branch your sequences.

Try it before next Monday

Sign up, plug in keywords, watch the first 10 leads land. If they look like leads you'd send to your SDR, the maths takes care of itself from there.