If you've priced out a proper prospecting stack, you've probably landed on some version of the same three tools: a contact database like Apollo, an email finder like Hunter, and a company-intelligence source like Crunchbase. Each solves a real, narrow problem. Stacked together, they solve the full one — at the cost of three separate subscriptions, three separate exports, and none of them actually talking to each other.
Here's what each tool is really doing, and what it takes to cover the same ground without paying for all three.
What each tool is actually for
Apollo is primarily a prospecting database: search by title, company size, or industry, and pull a list of people who match. Its core value is volume and filtering, not verification — the emails it returns carry varying confidence, and deliverability isn't guaranteed.
Hunter is an email finder and verifier: give it a name and a domain, and it either finds a matching address or confirms one you already have is deliverable. It doesn't help you discover who to look for in the first place — you still need a name.
Crunchbase is company and funding intelligence: funding rounds, investors, headcount, and founding dates. It tells you which companies are worth prospecting, but it doesn't give you a verified contact at any of them.
Used together, the workflow is: Crunchbase to find a company worth targeting, Apollo to find a person at it, Hunter to verify the email Apollo gave you (because Apollo's own confidence often isn't enough to trust on its own). Three tools, three logins, three bills, for one list.
Covering the same ground for less
For company and funding intelligence: Crunchbase's free tier covers a meaningful amount — recent funding rounds, investor names, and founding data for most companies that have raised. SEC EDGAR is a genuinely free, public source for funding disclosures tied to any company that's filed with the SEC (common past a certain round size). Startup press — TechCrunch's funding tag, sector-specific newsletters — catches most rounds within days of announcement.
For finding a name at a target company: LinkedIn (even the free tier) remains the most reliable way to confirm who currently holds a given title at a given company — titles on other sources go stale fast as people change roles.
For turning a name into a verified email: this is the step that's genuinely hard to DIY well. Free pattern-guessing (first.last@domain.com and its variants) gets you a candidate; a verification pass (SMTP check, at minimum) is what turns a guess into something safe to send to. Skipping verification is how good lists quietly become 20-30% dead within a year — bounce risk isn't hypothetical, it's the default outcome of unverified data.
The actual gap
Stitching the free versions of all three together works, but it's manual, it's slow, and — critically — nothing in that chain talks to anything else. You still have to manually connect "this company just raised a round" to "here's the decision-maker" to "here's their verified email," for every single prospect, every time.
That's the specific thing a combined, verified database is for: one place where the company you're looking at, the person who matters there, and a confidence-scored email are already connected — instead of three tabs and a spreadsheet holding it together. Adamlead does exactly that: verified contacts with the funding and hiring signals attached, filtered and revealed from one place. See pricing or browse recently funded companies to see what's actually on file before you commit to anything.