The $49 tool said no. So I scraped around it.

This week I needed a list of local businesses to reach out to.

The "industry standard" way to do this is a tool like Apollo or ZoomInfo. So I signed up. And the free plan wouldn't even let me run a search — the moment I clicked, it asked me to upgrade. $49 a month minimum, and the good filters live on the higher tiers.

I didn't pay. I built the list myself for about 15 cents.

The tool is Apify — a marketplace of pre-built scrapers (they call them "actors") that pull structured data off the web. The one I used scrapes Google Maps: you give it a search term and a town, and it hands back every matching business with its name, address, phone, website, rating, and review count. A few minutes of run time, a couple of cents per business.

Here's the honest part, because this newsletter doesn't do hype: the emails are hit-or-miss. Roughly a third of small businesses publish an email address you can scrape. The rest hide behind a contact form. I even ran a second scraper that crawls each website looking for an email, and across nineteen sites it found exactly one more. So if your plan depends on cold email specifically, scraping alone won't get you there — you'll still need phone, contact forms, or a paid database to fill the gap.

But for what it does well — a complete, structured list of every business of a given type in a given place, with phone and website — it's hard to beat fifteen cents.

Who this is for — Anyone who needs a list. Local outreach, competitive research, building a directory, finding vendors, market sizing. If you've ever thought "I just need a spreadsheet of every X in my area," this is the five-minute version.

Try it — Apify.com has a free tier with about $5/month of usage built in, enough to scrape hundreds of businesses before you pay anything. Search the store for "Google Maps" and you'll find several. Start small, see what comes back, then scale the search.

The lesson I keep relearning: before you pay for a SaaS tool, check whether the thing you actually need is a $0.15 script instead of a $49/month subscription. (There's a prompt for exactly that below.)

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 — Released May 28, the new flagship posts better benchmarks, but the more interesting upgrade is on honesty: it's more willing to say "I don't know" instead of confidently making something up. That's the trait that actually matters when you're trusting AI with real work. A model that's right 95% of the time and tells you which 5% it's unsure about beats a model that's right 97% of the time and hides it.

Meta unveiled Muse Spark — The first flagship model out of Alexandr Wang's new Superintelligence Labs, it's built to match much larger models on reasoning and multimodal tasks at a fraction of the compute cost. The headline isn't the benchmarks, it's the efficiency. Cheaper-to-run models are how AI features stop being a premium add-on and start being baked into everything.

Alteryx launched Agent Studio — At its Inspire conference, the analytics company rolled out a way for business analysts to turn existing data workflows into autonomous agents, plus an MCP server that lets those agents plug into Slack, Teams, and outside AI models. Translation: the "turn your spreadsheet process into an agent that just does it" pitch is going mainstream, aimed squarely at non-engineers.

Anthropic lent its unreleased model to find security bugs — Through a program called Project Glasswing, Anthropic gave AWS, Apple, Cisco, Google, JPMorgan, and Microsoft early access to a frontier model to hunt and patch critical software vulnerabilities. Worth watching: the same capability that finds bugs to fix them is the capability that finds bugs to exploit them. Defense is getting a head start, for now.

I got burned this week signing up for a tool whose free tier couldn't do the one thing I needed. Here's the prompt I should have run first. Paste a tool's pricing or features page, then add:

PROMPT:

That last line matters. Left to its own defaults, AI tends to describe the free tier optimistically. Telling it to be skeptical gets you the answer you actually need — before you've created the account and entered your email.

The best tool is usually the cheapest one that actually does the job. Sometimes that's $49/month. Sometimes it's fifteen cents.

Like what you're reading? Forward it to someone who'd get value from it. And if you're curious what AI automation could look like for your business, book a free 15-minute audit — no pitch, just a look at where you're leaving time on the table.