Outscraper Alternative: When You Need Decisions, Not Rows
A Google Maps scraper is the cheapest way to get local business data, and it's the wrong purchase if the hard part of your job is deciding who to contact. Outscraper, Scrap.io and Apify all do their job well. This is about what happens after the CSV downloads — and the honest arithmetic of whether you should pay someone else to do that part.
We make one of the alternatives, so weigh the comparison accordingly.
What scrapers do well
Credit where it's due. For a few dollars per thousand records you get business name, address, phone, website, rating, review count and category, across essentially any city on earth. The APIs are solid and the data is as fresh as Google Maps itself.
If you can write a little code or you're fast in a spreadsheet, nothing beats the price.
The part nobody costs properly
Here's the arithmetic people skip. Say you pull 1,000 businesses for $3.
- Filtering to the ones worth contacting: you need to decide what qualifies. Missing website? Under 4.2 stars? At least 15 reviews? Every combination changes the list.
- Working out the reason for each one: "no website" is a different pitch from "Facebook page instead of a website", which is different again from "site loads in six seconds".
- Writing the message: genuinely personalised, 5–8 minutes each. For 100 contacts that's most of a working day.
- Discarding the dead ones: listings with two reviews and no phone number. Usually 30–40% of the list.
The $3 was never the cost. The three to four hours per campaign was.
That's fine if your time is cheap or you enjoy the work. It stops being fine when prospecting is the thing you keep postponing.
When a scraper is clearly right
- You need tens of thousands of rows — no decision layer is cheaper at that volume
- You're building your own product on the data
- You have a defined, stable filter and just need it applied
- You want data from outside our coverage or beyond business listings
In all four cases, stay with Outscraper or Scrap.io. Paying for scoring you don't need is waste.
When it quietly costs more
- You run one campaign a week and the qualification is always ad hoc
- You don't know which signal predicts a reply in your niche yet
- You work across several languages and writing openers is slow
- Prospecting is the task that slips because it's tedious
What the alternative actually adds
Lead Radary works from the same Google Maps data. The difference is what arrives:
| Scraper output | Lead Radary output | |
|---|---|---|
| Business data | ✓ | ✓ |
| Signal detected | ✗ | no website / weak site / low rating / few reviews |
| Grade | ✗ | A/B/C/D with the reason |
| First message | ✗ | drafted in the prospect's language |
| Lookalike from a reference client | ✗ | ✓ |
| Market size for the niche | ✗ | ✓ |
| Price | ~$3 / 1,000 rows | from $15/month |
Where we're worse: far more expensive per row at volume. No sending. Company-level only, so no named contacts. Europe-focused rather than global. If any of those matter more than the qualification step, the scraper wins.
The honest way to decide
Run one campaign manually. Pull 200 rows from a scraper, qualify them yourself, write the messages, track how long it takes and what replies.
Then multiply by how often you'd do it.
If that's a couple of hours a month, keep the scraper — $15 to save two hours isn't obviously worth the extra tool. If it's half a day every week, the arithmetic flips hard, and it isn't close.
We'd rather you did that test than took our word for it. A free account covers a first search without a card.
Pricing checked August 2026.