How to Build a Lead List for Free: ScrapeGraphAI Instead of a Paid Scraper

Every time you need a list of companies for your niche, you end up paying for it. Some charge per record found, others sell access by subscription. I closed this expense line with a free tool.

Why a lead list usually costs money

Collecting company contacts by hand takes hours. You open a website, copy the name, industry, email, then move to the next one. Paid scrapers save time, but charge by volume: the more records, the higher the bill.

There's a third way. Hand the collection off to an AI and keep only the cost of the model in your budget, sometimes not even that.

ScrapeGraphAI: an open-source tool instead of a subscription

The tool is called ScrapeGraphAI. It's open source under the MIT license, with 29,850 stars on GitHub as of my check on August 24, 2026. The repository is active, with the latest push on August 23. It turns Claude into a scraper: you describe the task, and the model visits websites itself and pulls out the data you need.

The library itself is genuinely free. You only pay for calls to the model if you use a cloud API. If you run a local model on your own machine, you pay nothing at all: each record found costs $0.

What Claude collects, and what it leaves alone

An important boundary right at the start, so there's no need to explain it later. ScrapeGraphAI searches the web or crawls open company directories and pulls out what a business has already published for contact purposes: name, industry, city, website, work email, or phone number. Everything goes into a single spreadsheet.

Owner names, personal emails, and personal phone numbers of specific people are not collected, and shouldn't be. Those are personal data under Russian law, and collecting them without consent violates 152-FZ, Russia's data protection law. Using even open business contacts for cold advertising outreach without the recipient's consent isn't allowed either; that's separately covered by Article 18 of the Advertising Law. If you're planning a next step after collection, like a mailing, check what's allowed under both laws first.

Setup in three steps

Setup takes 5–10 minutes.

1. 1. Copy the repository link and paste it into Claude Code.
2. 2. Say "install this." Claude handles the dependencies itself.
3. 3. Describe the task: the business niche, which directories to crawl, how many records to collect at a time.

There are two honest ways to run it: a quick route through ScrapeGraphAI's hosted service with a free starter key, and a fully local route with no key at all. If you want to see what other tools can extend Claude Code beyond this one, I wrote a detailed breakdown in "5 MCP Servers for Claude Code".

The spreadsheet grows on its own every morning

A one-off collection solves a one-off task. A schedule solves an ongoing one. Ask Claude to save the setup and run it every morning; mine runs at 7:00 AM on weekdays. Then you just open the file and see what came in overnight. It works on Mac via cron or launchd, and on Windows via Task Scheduler.

What this actually costs

The library itself is under the MIT license, meaning it's free and legal for commercial use. The real cost is either a cloud model subscription, or zero if the model runs locally. There's no service subscription fee and no charge per record found.

Checklist before you set this up

• - Define your niche and source: whose directory or which search query to crawl.
• - Decide between a cloud model or a local one, since this determines the cost.
• - List the fields you need: name, industry, city, website, contact.
• - Review the 152-FZ section and Article 18 of the Advertising Law before doing anything with the list.
• - Set up a schedule so the spreadsheet fills in without you.

Bottom line

You no longer have to buy or manually collect a company contact database. Claude, through ScrapeGraphAI, does it for you, legally and without a daily subscription. The only difference is who sets up the workflow the first time.

If you'd like the same spreadsheet, message the Telegram bot with the word ЛИД, and I'll send you the repository, setup instructions for both methods, and three ready-made prompts. More tool breakdowns and workflows in the channel «Растём с ИИ».

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Язык: humanizer+no-ai-isms пройдены.