Re:Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw
by RovaAI on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @03:59PM
(#47328072)
The build vs buy calculus for B2B lead gen shifted in the last 18 months.
Before: LLMs weren't reliable enough for enrichment, scraping was fragile, APIs were expensive.
Now: Hunter.io gives 1000 verified email searches for $49/mo, LLMs can accurately summarize company pages, and a couple hundred lines of Python replaces what Apollo does for prospect research.
The practical threshold: if you're spending >$150/month on a lead gen platform and you have someone technical on the team, it's worth a weekend to prototype a custom stack. If you're not technical and don't want to become it, the platforms still make sense.
The hidden cost of the platforms isn't the subscription - it's that they give you contact data but not the enrichment that makes outreach relevant. That last step you end up doing manually anyway.
Before: LLMs weren't reliable enough for enrichment, scraping was fragile, APIs were expensive. Now: Hunter.io gives 1000 verified email searches for $49/mo, LLMs can accurately summarize company pages, and a couple hundred lines of Python replaces what Apollo does for prospect research.
The practical threshold: if you're spending >$150/month on a lead gen platform and you have someone technical on the team, it's worth a weekend to prototype a custom stack. If you're not technical and don't want to become it, the platforms still make sense.
The hidden cost of the platforms isn't the subscription - it's that they give you contact data but not the enrichment that makes outreach relevant. That last step you end up doing manually anyway.