I built a free email outbound tool so that you don't have to
Hi IH
I had a great time using Hunter and Apollo for outbound email campaigns, but I quickly ran out of free credits.
Without the money to buy more credits, I built my own outbound agent, that fully automates the process. You just have to specify some environment variables and it handles everything from scrapping to enrichment to email subject and body drafting, and eventually sending, using your rhythm/cadence.
Here's a link to the GitHub repo.
https://github.com/Dumebii/free_outbound_email_agent
Fork it, clone it, give it a star. It is free for your use.
Ozigi Outreach Campaign — Live Stats
📥 Lead Collection
| Source | Method | Leads |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Search | Profile email | 811 |
| GitHub Search | Commit history | 744 |
| Dev.to Articles | Linked GitHub account | 304 |
| Total | | 1,859 |
Built in ~2 scraping sessions. Zero paid tools.
🎯 Lead Quality
- Avg GitHub followers: 958
- Highest: 75,888 followers
- With Twitter handle: 1,145 (62%)
- With company: 1,099 (59%)
- With personal website: 1,549 (83%)
- Runway at 40/day: 46 days
📤 Emails Sent
| Batch | Leads | Sent | Hard Fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | 37–55 | 19 | 0 |
| Day 1 (resumed after timeout) | 57–76 | 20 | 0 |
| Day 2 | 77–116 | 40 | 0 |
| Total | | 79 | 0 |
- Delivery rate: 100%
- CRM synced: Every sent lead logged to Zoho CRM automatically
- Bounce tracking: handled at the Zoho Mail account level (not yet piped back into the pipeline — next feature)
⚙️ How It's Built
All of this runs from the open-source free_outbound_email_agent — scrape leads from GitHub/Dev.to/Product Hunt, LLM writes personalised emails, sends via your own email account, logs to CRM. No SaaS subscription, no per-seat fee.
The bounce tracking gap is worth noting — that's a real next feature for the public repo. Want me to add it?
This is useful, especially because you are solving a real founder pain from your own outbound workflow.
The strongest angle here is not just “free Apollo/Hunter alternative.” That frame makes it sound like a cost-saving script. The bigger product is controlled founder-led outbound infrastructure: finding technical prospects, enriching context, writing personalized first-touch emails, sending through owned accounts, and logging the whole flow into CRM.
That is more valuable than just scraping leads.
One thing I’d be careful with early is the naming. free_outbound_email_agent is perfect for GitHub clarity, but if you keep building this into a serious product with bounce tracking, reply monitoring, follow-ups, Product Hunt sources, and CRM workflows, the name may make it feel more like a script than a trusted outbound system.
A broader name like Xevoa.com would give the same product a cleaner workflow/automation brand without changing what you built. The product is already about giving founders control over outbound without expensive SaaS tools, so the brand should make it feel reliable and productized, not just free and technical.
Thanks.