Notes from inside a contact
intelligence engine.
Engineering deep-dives, product reasoning, and the occasional war story from indexing the public web.
Seven Apollo alternatives, and the case for staying put
Apollo bundles a database, sequences, a dialer, and an enrichment API behind per-seat pricing. Seven alternatives compared by pricing model, API access, and what each is actually for, plus an honest note on who should stay.
Clearbit is gone. Here's what to use instead.
Clearbit stopped selling to new customers after the HubSpot acquisition, and its free APIs went dark through 2025. Seven replacements compared by pricing model, API access, and what each is actually for.
There's no clean way to verify an email address. Here's what works anyway.
SMTP RCPT TO probing, catch-all detection, greylisting, and why every inbox provider lies to your verifier. The real-world rules behind getting an honest answer about whether an email address exists.
There is no LinkedIn email API. Here's what to use instead.
LinkedIn's first-party APIs don't expose contact data, and they're not going to. This is what every CRM, sales tool, and recruiting platform actually does — and how to do it yourself.
Why finding a GitHub user's email is harder than you'd think
GitHub's API doesn't expose user emails, commits get rewritten to noreply, and the events archive ships hashed addresses. Here's what it actually takes to resolve a GitHub login to a real, deliverable email.