What B2B data tool do you use for cold outreach? Looking for what actually works at solo-founder scale

Quick context: I built a B2B cold email toolkit as an alternative to Apollo/Clay (python scripts, runs locally, one-time payment). While building it I noticed most data tools are priced for teams, not solo founders.

Curious what people here are actually using:

• Hunter.io free tier (25 lookups/month) - anyone find this enough for targeted outbound?
• Apollo free plan (10 credits/month) - feels too limited, but the paid tier at $49/month is reasonable
• Building your own list from ProductHunt / IH / Twitter with free enrichment tools
• Something else entirely?

I'm specifically trying to understand if the pain is "the tools cost too much" or "the tools are hard to use" or "I don't know what data I actually need."

The reason I built my own stack: I was paying $262/month for tools I was using at 10% capacity. Replaced them with $49 of Python scripts. But curious if that's a common situation or if I'm an outlier.

What are you using, and what's your monthly budget for outbound data?