Clay is powerful, but I don’t want to pay 16–32 cents per lead when I’m running 10,000 leads through a system. In this video I show you how I cloned the parts of Clay I actually use—lead qualification, enrichment, and email finding—using n8n plus a few APIs, for about $24/month instead of $350+ just to access other tools’ APIs. The goal is simple: I drop in a list of domains, have AI find the decision maker, decide if they’re a fit, grab a verified email, and output a clean lead list ready for outreach. I build the workflow live, click-by-click: pull domains from Google Sheets, loop through them in batches, run a Google search via Serper to find the right contact (CEO in my example), send the snippet to GPT-4 to extract structured JSON (name, LinkedIn, summary, fit), then hit Findymail to get a verified email. After that, I run the email through NeverBounce so bad emails get skipped automatically, and I append the good leads back into a “processed leads” sheet. This isn’t about “canceling Clay”—I still use it for quick testing—but once something works, I want full control and almost-free leads.