Show IH: I turned a paid feature into a free tool as a lead magnet

Hey IH!

I'm building ChampSignal, a tool that tracks what your competitors are doing. One of the paid features watches news about companies you care about. It runs every day and sends alerts when a competitor gets press coverage.

A few weeks ago I was stuck on how to get more people to try it... then I thought: what if I took one feature and just gave it away?

So I built the Company News Finder.

What it does

You paste any company URL (like stripe.com). It searches thousands of news sources and pulls up to 10 recent articles from the last 30 days.

Each result gives you the headline, source, date, and an AI summary. So you can skim the news about any company in seconds instead of digging through Google.

No signup. No credit card. No account. Paste a URL, hit search, done.

I ran it on about 30 companies while building it and it found news for almost all of them, even smaller startups that barely show up on Google News.

Why I made it free (the honest version)

Two reasons:

1. Lead magnet. My hope is that people who like this will want the full version. The free tool gives you a one-time look. The paid version runs every day, scores each article by how important it is, filters out noise, and sends you alerts.

2. SEO. "Google Alerts alternative" gets about 150 searches/month. Not huge, but a free tool page could rank for it over time. For a solo founder, every visitor counts.

I know some people dress up their free tools like they're doing charity work. We're all founders here so I'll be real: this is a growth play. If it also helps people, even better.

The tech

For anyone who likes looking under the hood:

• SvelteKit for the frontend and server
• Exa AI for news search. It does a deep crawl across thousands of sources and catches stuff Google Alerts misses (niche blogs, smaller news sites). I tested it against Google News and Exa found way more results for smaller companies.
• Cloudflare Turnstile for bot protection without annoying CAPTCHAs
• One server action. Form submit hits the server, server calls Exa, results come back. No queues, no background jobs.

The paid version uses the same Exa engine but adds a GPT layer on top. Each article gets scored by how important it is and checked to see if it actually talks about the company. Then it filters out copies so 5 versions of the same press release become 1 signal. Only the stuff that matters sends you an alert.

What I learned

• Keep it stupid simple. I almost added date filters, source filters, sorting. Killed all of it. One input, one button. That's what makes people actually use it.
• Free tools cost more work than you'd think for something you charge $0 for. But zero friction means people actually try it.
• The words around the tool matter more than the tool. "Company News Finder" is fine. "Free Google Alerts alternative" gets way more interest. Same tool, different words.

What's next

I want to build 3-4 more free tools like this. Each one gives away a small piece of ChampSignal's tracking stack (website changes, SEO ranks, ad watching) as a tool on its own. A set of useful free tools that all point back to the full product.

Would love to hear from founders who've tried the "free tool as lead magnet" approach. Did it actually move the needle for you?

Happy to answer questions about the tech or the thinking behind it.