I spent a few years building data pipelines before I started selling access to them, and one thing that always bothered me was watching sales teams pay $300-500/month for ZoomInfo or Apollo to access data that the government literally gives away for free.
Not all of it, sure. But a lot more than people realize.
ZoomInfo, Clearbit, Apollo — they're aggregators. They crawl public sources, clean the data, and resell it with a nice UI on top. The markup is enormous. If you're willing to do a bit of the aggregation work yourself (or automate it), you can get surprisingly deep intelligence on companies and contacts without spending anything.
Here's what I actually use.
1. YellowPages — Local Business Leads
What you get: Business name, address, phone number, website, category, and sometimes reviews for tens of millions of local businesses across the US.
Why it matters for sales: If you're selling to SMBs — restaurants, contractors, medical practices, law firms — this is one of the cleanest sources of contact data that exists. Big databases like ZoomInfo are weak on small local businesses. YellowPages is not.
Automate it: YellowPages Business Search on Apify
2. Secretary of State Filings — Company Verification
What you get: Registered agent, officers, incorporation date, entity status, and in some states registered address for every LLC and corporation in the state.
Why it matters for sales: Before you spend time pursuing a prospect, it's worth knowing if the company is actually active and who the real decision-makers are. SOS filings often list officers by name. That's org chart data you're getting for free.
Automate it: US Business Entity Search on Apify — covers NY, TX, and CA right now, with more states coming.
3. SEC EDGAR — Public Company Financials
What you get: 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, proxy statements, insider trading disclosures, and more for every publicly traded company in the US.
Why it matters for sales: If you're selling to public companies, EDGAR is better than most paid intel tools for understanding financials, recent moves, and who owns what. Insider trading disclosures tell you which executives are selling shares — useful context before you pitch someone on a long-term deal. The proxy statements have executive compensation and board composition.
Automate it: SEC EDGAR Company Filings on Apify
4. IRS 990 Filings — Nonprofit Intelligence
What you get: Revenue, expenses, top employee salaries, grant recipients, and board members for every 501(c)(3) in the US. These filings are public by law.
Why it matters for sales: Nonprofits are a massive, often-overlooked sales vertical — universities, hospitals, foundations, and advocacy orgs all buy software, services, and consulting. The 990 tells you the organization's total budget, who the highest-paid people are (by name and title), and what they spend money on. That's better prospect intelligence than most CRMs have.
Automate it: IRS 990 Nonprofit Search on Apify
5. NPPES — Healthcare Provider Lookup
What you get: Every doctor, nurse practitioner, dentist, therapist, and healthcare organization with an NPI number — name, specialty, address, practice affiliation, and license type.
Why it matters for sales: If you're selling into healthcare — medical devices, software, billing services, supplies — NPPES is an underrated lead list. It's cleaned government data with specialty codes, so you can filter by exactly the provider type you're targeting. Beats buying a list from a broker.
Automate it: NPPES NPI Search on Apify
6. ClinicalTrials.gov — Pharma Pipeline Research
What you get: Every registered clinical trial in the US (and many internationally): sponsor, drug name, indication, phase, investigators, and trial sites.
Why it matters for sales: If you sell to pharma, biotech, or CROs, knowing what's in a company's pipeline is essential context for timing outreach and understanding their priorities. Phase 3 trials mean a drug might be 2-3 years from commercialization — that's when they start making big infrastructure investments. You can find that out here, for free, before their competitors can.
Automate it: ClinicalTrials.gov Search on Apify
7. USASpending.gov — Federal Contract Intelligence
What you get: Every federal contract award, grant, and loan — vendor name, amount, agency, date, and description.
Why it matters for sales: This one is criminally underused. If you're selling to companies that do government business — defense contractors, IT vendors, consulting firms — USASpending tells you exactly who's winning contracts, how much, and with which agencies. It's also a great prospecting list in its own right: companies that win government contracts tend to have budget. If a competitor just landed a $50M DoD contract, they're probably hiring and buying.
Automate it: USASpending.gov Search on Apify
8. USPTO Patent Search — IP Portfolio Research
What you get: Patent filings by company or inventor — application date, status, abstract, and assignee.
Why it matters for sales: For selling to tech companies, an IP portfolio tells you a lot about where a company is actually investing R&D versus what they say in press releases. Companies that are actively filing in a new category are probably building in that category — and they'll need tooling, talent, and infrastructure. You can also use this to identify acquisition targets: small companies with strong IP but few employees are often getting bought.
Automate it: USPTO Patent Search on Apify
9. FDA Recall Database — Product Safety History
What you get: Product recalls, market withdrawals, and safety alerts — company name, product, reason, and severity classification.
Why it matters for sales: This one is more niche, but if you sell quality management, compliance, or supply chain software, a prospect's recall history is highly relevant. Companies that have had Class I recalls (the serious ones) are often in the market for better QMS tools. It's also useful for due diligence when qualifying accounts — you probably want to know if a company you're about to chase just had a major FDA action.
Automate it: FDA Recall Search on Apify
10. LinkedIn — Manual Only, But Still Free
I'd be leaving something out if I didn't mention LinkedIn, even though programmatic access is heavily restricted. The free tier still lets you search by title, company, and geography, and Sales Navigator gives you a lot more for $99/month — which is a fraction of what ZoomInfo costs for comparable coverage.
The key is using it in combination with the sources above. Cross-reference a company you found in EDGAR or USASpending, look up their officers by name on LinkedIn, and you've got a fairly complete picture without paying enterprise data prices.
Putting It Together
The real value here isn't in any single source — it's in combining them. A company you found on YellowPages might have a 990 that shows their actual budget. A government contractor from USASpending might have patent filings that tell you their next product area. An executive you found in an SOS filing might have their career history on LinkedIn.
I built the Apify actors above specifically to make this kind of pipeline automatable. Instead of pulling data manually every time you start a prospecting campaign, you can wire these up to run on a schedule and feed results into your CRM or a spreadsheet.
If you're doing any volume of outbound sales and you're paying ZoomInfo prices, it's worth spending a few hours building a free alternative. The data quality won't be identical — these sources don't have personal email addresses or cell phone numbers — but for company-level intelligence, firmographics, and decision-maker identification, public data gets you most of the way there.
Happy to go deeper on any of these sources or how to automate the pipeline if there's interest.
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