Lead Generation

Sharing some lessons from building a Google Maps lead scraper for home services niches

Spent the last few weeks building a scraper for home service businesses (plumbers, electricians, HVAC, roofers, handymen) and learned a few things I wish I'd known earlier:

1. Google Maps caps results at ~120 per query no matter how you scroll. To get full coverage of a city you have to grid-search by neighborhood/zip and dedup by place_id.
2. The official Places API is cleaner but adds up fast, about $17–32 per 1000 detail calls depending on fields. Scraping is free but you need rotating delays or you'll eat CAPTCHAs around the 200-listing mark.
3. The highest-value field isn't phone, it's the website, because you can then crawl the site for emails. Email-enriched lists are worth roughly 3–5x phone-only lists in my experience pricing them out.
4. Reviews matter more than rating. A 4.2 with 800 reviews is a more reliable target than a 5.0 with 6.

Curious what others here are using for local lead gen. Apollo? Apify? Building your own?