from Hacker News

Ask HN: Decent Builtwith alternative for finding leads?

by Poomba on 9/24/25, 9:19 PM with 7 comments

Is there a cost-friendly Builtwith alternative that lets me find businesses that use a specific tech product? I find Builtwith a bit too expensive for my needs as it's $299 for 2 technologies, and I have 10+ I want find businesses for. And BuiltWith doesn't seem to have a lot of technologies I'm looking for either. I've tried Wappalyzer too, and though it's much less expensive, it also doesn't have data for a lot of niche technologies I'm targeting either.

For context, I own my own tech consulting business and want to find businesses that are trying to seriously start/expand an engineering team. I've already exhausted asking my network, existing clients, etc, and thinking of expanding now into more outbound stuff.

I was thinking of finding businesses that started using a particular Javascript framework or started using a "starter-level" devops product like BitBucket, as a way to find those businesses that are just beginning to scale their dev team

Are there any good alternatives out there? It feels like the type of tool that the HN crowd would be building...

  • by _chse_ on 10/3/25, 5:26 AM

    It feels like the type of tool that the HN crowd would be building...

    Bang on, I've been working on something that I've intended to be a cost-effective alternative to BuiltWith. I was thinking about just selling the datasets and allowing users to extract whatever they need from it. What technologies are you after?

  • by AznHisoka on 9/24/25, 9:31 PM

    Have you tried Bloomberry [1]? For instance, u can find companies that just started a Github organization profile or just started a self-hosted Gitlab instance (it scans DNS records for new instances). I think builtwith only focuses on front end facing technologies not backend.

    [1] Disclaimer: this is an API product I built myself and recently launched at bloomberry.com