Freelancers - how do you find client email addresses?

We've been freelancing in content marketing for about 3 years now and cold outreach is still my bigest struggle. Not the actual outreach part - I've got my templates dialed in and my response rates are decent. But finding the right contact info takes forever.

Right now I'm manually hunting through company websites, LinkedIn, and sometimes just guessing email formats. Works maybe 40% of the time? I've tried a few tools like Hunter and Apollo but theyre either too expensive for my volume or the data is outdated. Apollo especially felt like overkill for a freelancer tbh, its built for sales teams with way bigger budgets.

What's your process for getting verified emails? I'm targeting marketing managers and content leads at SaaS companies mostly. Do you use any specific tools or just stick to manual research? Also curious if anyone's found a good way to verify emails before sending - nothing worse than bounced outreach lol

I send maybe 50-100 cold emails per month so not huge volume, but enough that manual research is eating up too much time. my partner keeps telling me to just hire a VA for this but idk feels like there should be a better way. Would love to hear what's working for other freelancers trying to find client email addresses without spending hours on it.