For freelancers
Stop renting your income from a marketplace
Upwork and Fiverr are not the problem. Depending on them is. On a marketplace you compete on price against everyone in the world, you pay a cut of every invoice, and the platform owns the relationship with your client — so your income lasts exactly as long as your account does.
The alternative is not another marketplace. It is having your own pipeline: a list of businesses that need what you sell, contacted directly, at your price. There are 22,407,542 businesses with a phone number and no real website. Nobody is bidding against you for any of them.
Every number on this page comes from our own database and you can check the method in the free data study.
What a marketplace actually costs you
The visible cost
A commission on every invoice, for the life of the client. On $2,000 a month of work, a 10% cut is $200 a month — $2,400 a year — paid forever for an introduction that happened once.
The cost nobody counts
Price. On a marketplace your proposal sits beside fifty others and the client compares them on number first. Approach a business directly and there is nothing to compare you to — which is why the same work quotes two to five times higher.
How direct outreach actually works
Not a growth hack. Four steps, done consistently for a few weeks.
1. Pick a trade and a place
Not "small businesses". One trade, one city — the salons in Lahore, the plumbers in Manchester. A narrow list lets you write one message that sounds like it was written for the reader, and reuse it two hundred times.
2. Filter to the ones with a real problem
No website at all, or only a Facebook page. Those businesses are not choosing to be invisible, they have just never had a reason to act. That is a much warmer conversation than talking someone out of the site they already paid for.
3. Lead with the specific
"I noticed you're on Facebook but don't have a site — here's what your listing looks like when someone searches for you" beats any template. You can only write that sentence if you did step 2.
4. Do it a hundred times before you judge it
Response rates on good B2B outreach run around 5%. Twenty approaches gets you one reply and feels like failure; two hundred gets you ten conversations and two or three clients, and feels like a business. The difference between the freelancers this works for and the ones it does not is almost never the message. It is whether they were still sending in week three.
Who this actually suits
Good fit
- Web designers and developers — see the numbers
- SEO and local-search freelancers — see the numbers
- Google Business Profile and local-listing work
- Meta and Google Ads for local businesses
- Branding, logo and print for high-street trades
- Bookkeeping, admin and virtual assistance
- Photography and video for restaurants, salons, hotels
Poor fit — and we would rather you knew now
If your clients are not local businesses, this database will not help you. Illustrators, SaaS copywriters, YouTube editors, game developers, technical writers, anyone selling to startups or to other freelancers: your buyers are not in a map dataset of shops and restaurants. Save your $27.
The free tier exists precisely so you can find that out without paying. Ten exports, no card.
Questions
Is this an alternative to Upwork or Fiverr?
No, and we would rather say so plainly. A marketplace brings you buyers who already want to hire someone; what you pay for is that demand, and the competition that comes with it. We do the opposite job: we hand you businesses that are not looking for anyone yet, with the phone number attached. That is harder work and it is worth more, because nobody is bidding against you and you set the price.
I have never done outreach. Is this for me?
It is, but be honest with yourself about the maths. Roughly one in twenty well-targeted approaches turns into a conversation, and perhaps one in five of those into work. That means a hundred contacts to land your first client or two — a week of consistent effort, not an afternoon. Everyone who quits does so in the first fifty.
What do I actually get for $27 a month?
Search across 74,223,561 business locations in 405 countries: filter by country, city and trade, filter to the ones with no website or only a Facebook page, and export up to 25,000 records a month as CSV with names, addresses, phone numbers and — where they exist — email addresses. You can also score the businesses that do have a site, which gives you something concrete to open a conversation with.
Is cold outreach legal?
Business-to-business contact is lawful in most countries, but the rules differ and they are not optional. In the EU and UK, PECR and GDPR govern email to businesses; in the US, CAN-SPAM requires a real address and a working opt-out; several countries restrict cold calling to numbers on a do-not-call register. The data we supply is business contact information, not personal data about individuals — but how you use it is your responsibility, and worth thirty minutes of reading before you start.
Which freelancers is this not useful for?
Anyone whose clients are not local businesses. If you illustrate book covers, write for SaaS companies, or edit YouTube videos, a database of dentists and cafes will do nothing for you. This is for people who sell something a business on a high street can buy: a website, SEO, a Google Business Profile, ads, photography, bookkeeping, admin support.
Your first hundred prospects, free
Ten exports on the free plan, no card. Pick a city and a trade, filter to the businesses with no website, and see whether the list looks like work you could win.
Start free — no card Read the data first