I didn't have $200 to pay for cold outreach for my startup, so I built a free open-source alternative.
Hey IH,
I've been doing cold email outreach for Ozigi (an AI content tool I'm building) and kept running into the same wall: paid tools were overkill, free SMTP accounts kept rate-limiting me, and I didn't have full control over what was going out.
So I built my own pipeline and open-sourced it this week.
What it does:
Finds prospects on GitHub (by bio keywords: "developer advocate", "indie hacker", "technical writer", etc.) and Dev.to (by tag)
Extracts emails — public profile first, commit history as fallback
Generates a personalized email per lead using Claude or GPT-4. Not templates — the LLM gets the lead's full profile and writes fresh copy for each person, constrained to 120 words, a specific opener, and a banned word list
Sends via any SMTP server, Gmail, or Zoho Mail
Tracks sent emails to avoid duplicates across runs
Optionally syncs to HubSpot (free tier) or Zoho CRM
The cost: just your LLM API calls. Roughly $1/day at 50 emails. Everything else is free.
One config.yaml controls everything — ICP, tone, banned words, daily send limit, provider. You never touch the code between campaigns.
What's on the roadmap:
More sources (Product Hunt, Hashnode)
Reply monitoring and follow-up sequences
Terminal UI for reviewing leads before sending
Would love feedback from anyone who tries it, especially on what lead sources matter to you.
Feel free to give a star, and to share this to those who would need it.
→ https://github.com/Dumebii/free_outbound_email_agent
The follow-up sequence part on your roadmap is the one that will change results the most. Most replies don't come from the first email and that is the exact step people skip when building their own pipeline. Built something similar on Make.com and Airtable instead of code. Same idea though. One lead at a time on a schedule, status field to prevent duplicates, runs in the background. The no-code version takes about a day to set up and costs nothing ongoing. Happy to share how I set mine up if useful.
This is useful, especially because you are solving a real founder pain from inside your own workflow.
The bigger angle is not “free cold outreach.” That can sound cheap and spam-adjacent. The stronger position is controlled outbound infrastructure for early founders: find relevant technical prospects, generate thoughtful first-touch emails, avoid duplicate sends, and keep the founder in control of the campaign.
The name is where I’d be careful. “free_outbound_email_agent” works for GitHub, but if Ozigi or this tool becomes serious, that naming frame will make it feel like a script instead of a product. For something that touches prospecting, personalization, CRM sync, and founder-led sales, the brand has to feel more trusted and less like an automation hack.
Xevoa.com would fit this direction better as a clean workflow/automation brand. It keeps the tool on the founder’s side: practical, controlled, and scalable, without making it sound like another spammy outreach bot.
I’d pressure-test that before adding Product Hunt, Hashnode, reply monitoring, and follow-up sequences, because once the tool expands, the current name may cap how seriously people read it.