openleads 3.5.0

Free, open-source Apollo/Hunter alternative: find anyone, verify deliverably, write and send cold email that lands — local-first, keyless, $0. Ground-truth email harvesting, on-device send-time automation, IMAP Sent-folder visibility, a free natural-language campaign assistant, and a Claude-Code-style CLI.

🧲 OpenLeads

Apollo for everyone. For $0.

Find founders, developers, doctors, researchers — anyone — verify their email deliverably, write the cold email, and send it. Free, open source, keyless, and entirely on your machine.

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Apollo, Hunter, RocketReach, and ZoomInfo sell the same two things: a contact database and email verification — then upsell you the sending. OpenLeads is the whole stack, inverted and free.

A universal entity → verified email → cold email → sent machine, fed by a registry of pluggable, keyless, public data sources — running entirely on your laptop.

v3 is the ultimate update. v2 found and verified leads. v3 closes the loop: it writes the email and sends it, behind a deliverability engine that beats Hunter & Apollo's free tier — all for $0, with a zero-dependency core, and no data ever leaving your machine.

$ openleads run "50 AI founders in SF, verified only" --live
  [engine] source=yc — searching…
   safe   [e-mail]        Ada Lovelace · Founder · 96
   safe   [e-mail]    Grace Hopper · CEO     · 91
   risky  [e-mail]   J. Doe       · —       · 58   (held back)
  [engine] done — 41 safe · 9 risky
  [write]  drafting 41 personalized emails…
  [outbox] sender grade A · warmup day 6 · 40/day
   sent   → [e-mail]   «quick idea re: your launch»
  → 40 sent · 1 held (cap) · 0 bounced

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✨ The four clicks

The painful multi-tool workflow — scrape in A, verify in B, enrich in C, load into sender D, warm up in E — collapses into one local app + CLI:

1 · Find	Describe who you want in plain English.	Keyless public sources → resolved emails.
2 · Write	Personalized, spam-linted, plain-text drafts.	Free LLM or sharp template — edit anything.
3 · Connect	One-time mailbox setup with provider presets.	A preflight grades your SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
4 · Send	Throttled, warmup-capped, suppression-aware.	One-click unsubscribe headers. No tracking pixels.

Do it in the terminal (openleads run …), in the chat REPL (openleads), or in the local web dashboard (openleads web).

🖥️ The local dashboard

openleads web   # opens http://127.0.0.1:8787 — no Node, no build, no cloud

A hand-built single-page app served by a stdlib HTTP server bound to localhost. Find, Leads, Compose, Send, CRM, Settings, and Doctor — with the four-click path front and centre and results streaming in live. Black-and-white with hints of red, reduced-motion aware, and nothing leaves your machine. See docs/web.md.

📡 Why the emails actually land

Most free finders verify with a single SMTP RCPT probe over outbound port 25 — which home ISPs and most clouds block. When it's blocked, every address silently degrades to a first.last@domain guess and your campaign bounces. That was v2's #1 failure.

v3 cross-checks seven independent signals — most needing no port 25 at all — then gates honestly into three tiers so you only send what's likely to land:

Signal	Needs port 25?
MX consensus — two DoH resolvers must agree	no
SPF · DMARC · provider class — TXT lookups	no
Disposable / role / free-provider — static lists	no
Gravatar existence — md5 → 200/404	no
Ground-truth harvest — real emails from GitHub commits, mailto:, security.txt	no
Learned domain patterns — compound across every run	no
SMTP RCPT + catch-all double-probe	yes (graceful when blocked)

→ safe (send it) · risky (kept, held back by default) · bad (dropped). Every lead carries an explainable 0–100 score and a reasons[] list. Deep dive: docs/deliverability.md.

🆚 vs. the free tiers

	OpenLeads	Apollo / Hunter (free)
Cost	$0, forever	credit-limited, then paid
API key required	❌ none	✅ required
Who you can find	founders, devs, doctors, researchers + any vertical you plug in	their database only
Email verification	✅ 7-signal consensus + 0–100 score	paid feature
Writes the email	✅ free LLM or template	❌ / upsell
Sends it for you	✅ warmup, throttle, suppression	upsell
Where it runs	🔒 your machine, no data leaves	their cloud
You own the code	✅ readable, hackable	❌ black box
Core dependencies	zero (stdlib only)	—

🚀 Install

# Python (recommended) — zero-dependency engine + the full local app
pip install "openleads[all]"

# minimal: just the engine + plain CLI
pip install openleads

Prefer Node? A thin wrapper runs it via npx (it installs the Python package on first use):

npx openleads find "50 fintech founders verified only"
# or: npm i -g openleads

Try it in 10 seconds:

pip install "openleads[all]"
openleads doctor     # check your finding + sending setup
openleads web        # launch the local dashboard
# …or stay in the terminal:
openleads            # the interactive chat — just type what you want

openleads --version should print openleads 3.5.0. Full walkthrough: docs/quickstart.md.

⚡ Commands

# find + verify — every lead carries a calibrated Confidence %
openleads find "50 fintech founders, verified only" --out leads.csv
openleads find "emails at stripe.com"             # Hunter-style domain search
openleads find --source npi --keyword pediatric --location CA --format json

# the whole pipeline: find → write → send (dry-run unless --live)
openleads run "rust developers in Berlin"
openleads run "20 SaaS founders" --live

# one-line natural-language campaign (free, no key needed)
openleads assistant "send 50 emails to fintech founders for my SaaS at 9am"

# automation — your machine sends for you
openleads schedule --at 09:00   # install a daily on-device drip (launchd/cron)
openleads drip --live           # run one cycle now (due campaigns + follow-ups)

# pieces of it
openleads write "10 AI founders" -o drafts.json   # just draft
openleads send  "10 AI founders" --live           # find → write → send
openleads verify [e-mail] [e-mail]      # verify concrete addresses

# manage
openleads sources          # what you can search
openleads crm              # your local CRM (leads + touches + status)
openleads config           # set keys, mailbox, sender identity, send limits
openleads doctor           # health-check finding + sending
openleads inbox            # scan IMAP for replies & bounces (optional)

Sending is dry-run by default everywhere — add --live to actually send. The finder never touches your mailbox. Real sends are also saved to your IMAP Sent folder so they show up in your mail client (configurable via save_to_sent).

💬 The chat CLI

openleads chat (or just openleads) opens a Claude-Code-style REPL. Type in plain English — it finds, or, when you ask to send/schedule, configures the whole campaign:

openleads ❯ pediatricians in California, verified only
openleads ❯ emails at stripe.com
openleads ❯ send 30 emails to rust developers in Berlin for my dev tool at 9am
openleads ❯ /schedule 09:00     # run it unattended, daily
openleads ❯ /send live          # …or deliver the previewed batch now

Works fully offline via a rule-based parser (no key needed). Set OPENROUTER_API_KEY (a free model works) to upgrade free-form understanding and AI drafting.

🧩 Sources (and adding your own)

$ openleads sources
  domains      [company] any company domain (Hunter-style email search)
  github       [people ] developers & open-source orgs
  hn           [company] companies hiring now (Hacker News)
  npi          [people ] U.S. doctors & healthcare providers
  openalex     [people ] researchers & academics
  producthunt  [company] trending products & startups
  yc           [company] startup founders (Y Combinator)

New in v3.5 — the leads actually work. Ground-truth harvesting now runs by default: OpenLeads reads a company's own published addresses to learn its email pattern, so a real sibling address promotes every coworker to an evidence-backed safe — the free analogue of Hunter's domain search, also exposed directly as the new domains source (openleads find "emails at stripe.com"). Every lead carries a calibrated Confidence %, port 25 is probed once (not per lead, so searches are fast even when it's blocked), and a free assistant turns "send 50 emails to X at 9am" into a scheduled, on-device campaign.

All keyless and free. Want a vertical we don't ship — recruiters, lawyers, real-estate agents, your CRM export? Drop a *.py file in ~/.openleads/sources/:

from openleads.sources.base import Source
from openleads.models import Entity, Query

class LawyersSource(Source):
    name, kind, vertical = "lawyers", "people", "attorneys"
    description = "State bar directory."

    def search(self, query: Query):
        for row in fetch_from_some_free_directory(query):
            yield Entity(full_name=row["name"], organization=row["firm"],
                         domain=row["firm_domain"], source=self.name)

Run openleads sources and it's there. The email engine handles the rest. Guide: docs/sources.md.

🔒 Local-first by design

No hosted backend. No accounts. No tracking. Your leads, drafts, mailbox credentials, learned patterns, and CRM all live in a local SQLite file under ~/.openleads. The engine talks only to public data sources and your mail server. Secrets are stored chmod 600 and never sent back to the browser.

🔍 How it works

flowchart LR
    Q[Your request<br/>chat · CLI · web] --> I[Intent parser<br/>rule-based ± free LLM]
    I --> S[Source plugin<br/>yc · github · npi · openalex · …]
    S --> E[Deliverability engine<br/>7 signals → score → tier]
    E --> W[Compose<br/>spam-linted draft]
    W --> P[Preflight<br/>SPF/DKIM/DMARC + warmup]
    P --> D[Send<br/>throttled · suppression-aware]
    D --> C[(Local SQLite<br/>CRM · patterns · cache)]
    E <--> C

Same path is invoked by the CLI, the chat REPL, and the web dashboard. Architecture: docs/architecture.md.

🧭 Responsible use

OpenLeads is for legitimate outreach, recruiting, research, and prospecting. Some verticals carry extra weight — healthcare providers (NPI), academics — so please read docs/responsible-use.md. You are responsible for anti-spam law (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL) and each source's terms. v3 ships the guardrails (suppression, one-click unsubscribe, warmup caps, dry-run defaults); using them well is on you.

🗺️ What's new in v3.0

• ✅ Multi-signal deliverability engine — 7 signals, mostly no port 25, honest safe/risky/bad tiers
• ✅ Writes + sends — drafting, provider presets, preflight, warmup, suppression, follow-ups
• ✅ openleads run — find → verify → write → send in one command
• ✅ Local web dashboard (openleads web) — no Node, no cloud
• ✅ In-app config + doctor — no dotfile editing
• ✅ Local CRM, dedupe, learned patterns that compound across runs

See the full CHANGELOG.

🤝 Contributing

PRs very welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The highest-impact contribution is a new source plugin (guide) — that's literally how OpenLeads becomes "Apollo for everyone."

📄 License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for personal, research, educational, and nonprofit use. Commercial use? See COMMERCIAL-LICENSE.md.

🙏 Acknowledgements

yc-oss/api · OpenAlex · NPI Registry · GitHub & ProductHunt public data · Gravatar · and everyone who has ever rage-quit a "request a demo" button.

If OpenLeads saved you a subscription, consider leaving a ⭐ — it genuinely helps.