I saw you stopped using Apify to scrape Apollo leads and now suggest LinkedIn with the posted-in-last-90-days filter, but you don't get emails that way. What's a similar cost-effective alternative to scrape high-quality, latest leads like Apollo or Apify scrapers? What is a good new scraping stack?
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as your primary data source. Set the filter 'posted in last 90 days' to true, then feed that into either Airscale or Vein or any one of the other intermediary scraping tools. What this will do is take your LinkedIn — which right now is just a list of names and profiles — and convert it into a list of email addresses. You can expect to get somewhere between 30% and 60% of the profiles as email addresses, and they'll have a reasonably low bounce rate assuming you do things right. You can then verify them using something like Million Verifier — there are a variety of different ones and I'm not going to talk too much about that because they change virtually every month. Mails.so is another okay one.
To gather leads on Apollo for your target niches, start by building a list in Apollo (e.g., real estate agencies, hiring agencies, digital marketing agencies). Export that list’s URL and paste it into a scraper like Apify (or Ampify) to pull the data and extract email addresses—this is cheaper than scraping LinkedIn directly. If your initial list is too small (e.g., only 50 leads), broaden the filters (remove overly specific sectors) to increase volume. Export the results to CSV, then run them through a workflow that combines the emails with profile fields (such as headline, title) and uses AI to generate personalized one‑line icebreakers. Finally, feed those icebreakers and emails into a platform like Instantly to automate your outreach.
I have. Honestly, most people never get to that point, and beginners often hit perceived roadblocks that stop them from starting. I don’t worry about that; I just send them to all of the audience members. Note that Apollo’s data is a few years old, so the leads aren’t refreshed frequently. When I run out of an audience on Apollo, I recreate the same audience in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and use tools like Phantom Buster or Appify Scraper, which can give me three to four times more leads. You’ll need to deduplicate, but this works especially well for niches with high turnover or rapid growth, such as recruitment lead generation. I also use non‑traditional scraping methods—directories, databases, conference lists, etc.—to gather low‑hanging fruit, then move on to higher‑ROI sources. The key is to start scraping now rather than waiting for the perfect list.
There are a couple of free email-validation alternatives, but they're not great — Lumbrid is one, though it's overly aggressive and flags a lot of good emails as bad. Depending on which Apollo/Apify scraper you're using, I'd recommend two things: pull personal emails alongside business ones (I weave both in and actually get a higher reply rate from personal addresses, and it lifts overall deliverability too), and either run an email verifier or just turn off the feature that auto-pauses your campaign at a bounce-rate threshold — Instantly will warn you it hurts deliverability, but on the campaign from my “watch me start and sell an AI service in 10 hours” video, I raw-dogged the Apify/Apollo export with zero validation and I'm still sitting at a 4% reply rate with healthy mailboxes. So you can just raw-dog it like I did.
These days most people are using LeadsFinder, which costs about $1.50 per 1,000 leads with emails; there are a few newer similar tools popping up at around $1.70 per 1,000. Even though I don’t have an Apollo account (so I’m effectively out of credits), I’d just scrape using one of these alternative services—they’re plentiful on Apify, and you can also scrape other platforms. If you run out of Apollo credits, the same approach applies: use a lead‑scraping tool like LeadsFinder or another provider to build your lead list, then proceed with your outreach (e.g., Instantly) as usual.