Find Leads Cheaply

Short answer: search and enrich only the leads you will actually contact, paying per lookup instead of per seat. A typical Locus flow — Apollo people-search to build the list, Apollo or Prospeo to enrich, ZeroBounce to verify — costs a few cents per verified lead. A 200-lead monthly list usually lands well under the price of one database seat.

• •Build the list — Search by title, seniority, location, or company domain with Apollo people-search. Filter hard before enriching so you never pay for rows you will not contact.
• •Enrich the shortlist — Enrich each prospect by email, LinkedIn URL, or name. Fall back to Prospeo when Apollo lacks a record — the same balance covers both.
• •Verify before outreach — Run emails through ZeroBounce validation to remove undeliverable and risky addresses. Verification costs far less than the bounces and domain damage it prevents.
• •Add context — Check company stack with BuiltWith or recent signals with Exa web search so every outreach line references something real.

Database plans bundle seats, credit pools, sequences, and dialers — most of which a founder or small team never fully uses. Credits often expire, seats multiply with headcount, and annual billing locks you in. Pay-per-request flips this: every cent maps to a lead you enriched, and the same balance works across every provider in the catalog.

Costs vary by operation and each endpoint publishes its current per-request price in the catalog, so check before you run. As a rule of thumb, search pages cost the least, enrichment costs a few cents per record, phone reveals cost more than emails, and verification is the cheapest step. Skipping phone reveals on cold leads and verifying every email before sending keeps the average cost per contacted lead low.

Pay-per-lead wins under roughly a few thousand enrichments a month. If your team enriches tens of thousands of records monthly with steady volume, compare the per-request total against an annual database plan — high, predictable volume is the one case where a subscription can win. Everyone else should stay pay-per-use.