The Good, The Slop, & The Overpriced

PROSPECT RESEARCH & INTENT MINING

Apify: Grade A-

USE CASES

• Unlock access to > 55,000 tools for growth & research workflows

• Run those tools in workflows natively on the platform

• Monitor public posts for buyer intent signals

• Pull reactions and comments around narrow topics or accounts

• Add contact context without logins

• Feed results into your own prospect qualification workflow

DESCRIPTION

Cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation with a marketplace of pre-built "Actors" (agents) for sites like Google Maps, Instagram, and Amazon. You can pull structured data from almost any sit via API without maintaining scraper infrastructure yourself.

Pricing starts free with $5 in monthly usage credit, then paid plans run $29 /mo for the Starter plan, $199 /mo for Scale, and $999 /mo for Business.

REVIEW

I definitely scored when I found this tool and I think it’s going to become a core part of our stack for growth and prospecting. For the sake of the review, I tested this in a sandbox environment just to sample what I could get from the library of tools and see how expensive runs were.

These queries were focused on figuring out how to “mine” buyer intent. For those who don’t know, mining buyer intent is the process of figuring out how to find prospects on social channels that are already expressing interest in buying the thing you’re selling, in our case that’s AI implementation services of course.

Here were the three tests I ran:

• LinkedIn post and engagement discovery: Across three queries, I pulled 24 public posts in about 6 seconds for $0.05. A separate engagement run returned 5 posts, 29 reaction records, and 14 comments in about 21 seconds for $0.06.

• Reddit explicit-intent discovery: A broad search returned 23 public posts in about four minutes for $0.13. The results were noisy and none justified outreach.

• Public-profile qualification: One public profile took about 5.8 seconds and cost $0.006. However, this profile wasn’t within our immediate ICP. Probably a skill issue on my end, not the tool.

While these three tests didn’t provide immediate results (which is fine), I still think the opportunity here is huge and I just need to spend more time with it. Next step is figuring out how to add this to a stage within our contact enrichment waterfall in a production environment so that we can collect these results in our CRM and improve the waterfall overtime.

> Brody

CRM & RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Attio: GRADE B−

USE CASES:

• Model your business with custom objects instead of a preset schema

• Score and enrich records with custom attributes

• Run sequences and send email without leaving the CRM

• Connect agents to your pipeline through the hosted MCP

• Search notes, emails and calls semantically

• Report on pipeline without exporting anything

DESCRIPTION:

Deeply customizable CRM built on a flexible data model. Custom objects and custom attributes are the headliners, with rule based relationships, saved views, sequences, email, tasks, call recording and reporting layered on top. Hosted MCP with roughly 38 tools.

Real month to month price is $44 a seat on Plus, capped at 10 seats, and $99 on Pro. The $35 and $79 you see advertised require prepaying twelve months. Free covers 3 seats, and credits meter AI on top of whatever you land on.

REVIEW:

I've used Attio for years and watched it grow up. The data model is the actual product, and there's a massive gap between beginners and power users. Two years ago I'd have graded this an A+ without thinking twice.

Then look at what you actually pay. Five seats on Pro is $495 a month, $5,940 a year, before a single credit overage. Prices went up in July, and in the same move Plus picked up a ten seat ceiling it never had. Custom objects, sequences and call intelligence are all Pro only, so everything worth having sits at the top of the lineup. Credits are the invoice nobody budgets for: the research agent burns ten credits per record, so 500 inbound leads eats half your monthly pool in one pass.

The MCP is genuinely good and I have no problem saying that. 38 tools, semantic search across notes, emails and calls, writes held for confirmation. If you're staying, that's what you build on. The recorder is lacking. A bot parks in your call every time, so we run Granola for capture and let the native integration land the notes.

The old defense was that Attio undercut HubSpot. At real monthly numbers it's $99 against $100 and that gap is gone. We ran our entire client and prospect database here. After the pricing move, we're looking at forking it into a custom Monday backend.

> Jake

CONTENT DRAFTING & SCHEDULING

Stanley: Grade C-

USE CASES

• Turn past LinkedIn posts into new draft ideas

• Capture ideas through voice notes

• Plan and schedule content on a calendar

• Connect publishing tools and post across many channels

DESCRIPTION

Multi-integration content drafting, scheduling, and analytics tool with iMessage compatibility. No API and $50 /mo.

REVIEW

This app feels pretty pointless, for me at least. The use cases sound good in theory, the UI is clean, the metrics are somewhat helpful, but it doesn’t solve the core issue that I continue experiencing with LLM-writing: it is nearly impossible to get it to emulate my style.

I uploaded everything it asked, my writing samples, all of my previous LinkedIn posts, but it just produced generic slop that my own custom content engine can outperform.

Now, I don’t want to beat on this app too much because the features and integrations are pretty robust and the UI is nice, but I’m not one to really plan content and publish across platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok, so it’s not useful for me outside of content drafting, which it can’t do well.

Honestly, I think the best content can’t be planned on a calendar. All of my best performing content was created when I simply sat down, typed, and posted it. No proofreading, no editing, just flow state on a candid thought I had around the industry or an idea at that point in time. I’m just going to keep doing that, even though its not “optimal.”

> Brody