Had a really interesting call last week with someone who runs a high-volume cold email operation.
He walked me through his workflow — how he scrapes, enriches, and personalizes at scale. But when we got to the tooling part, he paused and said:
“I love Clay, but I’m paying over $300/month just to use custom APIs. It feels crazy.”
That stuck with me.
As someone who’s been building tools for solo founders, that kind of friction hits a nerve. When a great workflow becomes too expensive or limiting, it kills momentum.
So I started experimenting. Nothing fancy, just trying to see if I could replicate the functionality he actually needed, without all the fluff.
Now there’s a scrappy little version up and running. It’s definitely not Clay. But it solves that one pain point, using your own APIs, easily.
franksondors · 22h ago
but there are Clay alternative like Persana, Databar, Leadsforge etc.
He walked me through his workflow — how he scrapes, enriches, and personalizes at scale. But when we got to the tooling part, he paused and said:
“I love Clay, but I’m paying over $300/month just to use custom APIs. It feels crazy.”
That stuck with me.
As someone who’s been building tools for solo founders, that kind of friction hits a nerve. When a great workflow becomes too expensive or limiting, it kills momentum.
So I started experimenting. Nothing fancy, just trying to see if I could replicate the functionality he actually needed, without all the fluff.
Now there’s a scrappy little version up and running. It’s definitely not Clay. But it solves that one pain point, using your own APIs, easily.