Lead Finder is a search engine for local business leads. You describe the kind of businesses you want in plain language, and Lead Finder discovers them in real time, finds their public contact emails, verifies that those emails are deliverable, and lets you push the leads straight into a MailBeast campaign - all without leaving the platform.
This guide walks through what happens behind every search, the four phases a lead passes through, and how to use Lead Finder day to day.
The big precrawled B2B databases are built around large companies. The local businesses most people actually want to reach - contractors, dentists, gyms, restaurants, salons, local agencies - are barely covered. Lead Finder is built specifically for those businesses.
A few things to know up front:
It's a separate product. Lead Finder has its own subscription, its own credit balance, and its own billing cycle. It works on its own, and an Email Outreach plan can optionally extend it (more on that under Credits & Billing).
It works in plain language. You don't configure scrapers or learn a filter syntax. You describe the businesses you want, and the AI builds the search for you.
Everything is discovered live. Lead Finder doesn't hand you a pre-made list that's already been sold to everyone else. It assembles each list the moment you search, so the data is current and the inboxes aren't burned out.
Every lead moves through up to four phases. The first two happen automatically when you run a search; the last two run on demand, so you stay in control of your credits.
Phase | What happens | Runs | Typical credit cost |
|---|---|---|---|
1. Query Formation | Your plain-language request is turned into a structured search (what + where). | Automatically, on every search | 1 credit |
2. Discovery | Matching local businesses are found in real time and streamed into your table. | Automatically, on every search | ~0.25-0.75 per company (cheaper on higher tiers) |
3. Email Search | Public contact emails (and a free phone number) are pulled for the businesses you choose. | On demand ("Find Emails") | 1 per email found |
4. Validation (optional) | Each email is scored for deliverability so you only send to live inboxes. | On demand, or later at campaign import | 0.5 per email |
A fully enriched, validated lead works out to about 2 credits depending on your tier. If a business turns out to have no email, you're not charged for finding or validating it. However, discovery credits are still charged in any case since the business was found.
You start by describing who you want, in a single sentence - for example:
"Dentists in Chicago"
"HVAC contractors in Arizona"
"Yoga studios in California"
"Law firms in New England"
Lead Finder reads that sentence and builds a structured request: what you're looking for (the business type) and where (the location). It resolves the location to a real geographic area, whether that's a single city, a state, a region, or an entire country - Lead Finder works at any level, across around 150 countries.
Building the search costs 1 credit - charged once per each search request.
Once you confirm, Discovery begins. Lead Finder sweeps the target area and pulls matching local businesses live, the moment you search - assembled from public sources, sites, directories and listings across the web, de-duplicated, and structured into a clean table.
Results stream in as they're found, so you watch the list build in real time. Each row includes the business name, location, website, and phone number. Discovery is what populates your list; it does not find emails yet - that's the next phase.
A few details that matter:
It's real-time, not a stale Linkedin-like database. Because each business is discovered at search time, you get current, open businesses - and you're often the first to reach them.
It's exclusively yours. The list isn't a precrawled file resold to every competitor.
There's a per-search cap by tier. Discovery collects up to a set number of businesses per search depending on your plan (for example, up to 2,000 on the entry tier and up to 10,000 on the top tier). When the cap is reached, Discovery stops.
Discovering each company costs a small fraction of a credit (roughly 0.25-0.75, cheaper on higher tiers).
Discovery gives you businesses to work with. Inside the local lead finder, you are able to filter or remove unwanted businesses before you start collect their emails. Email Search gives you the people you can actually email. Select any business - or run it across your whole list at once - and press Find Emails.
For each business, Lead Finder checks the public sources a business publishes about itself - its public listings and public profiles and pages - to pull a working email address. The business's phone number is included for free, and Lead Finder can find up to 5 mailboxes per business, in priority order.
You'll get a mix of addresses: business mailboxes (like info@ or contact@) and personal mailboxes that are publicly associated with the business. The common thread is that they were published by the business itself, which makes them a legitimate point of contact.
Email Search costs 1 credit per email found. Credits are reserved when the search starts. If a business has no discovered email, reserved credits are released for such leads.
Validation scores each email for deliverability so you only send to live inboxes - protecting your sender reputation and keeping bounce rates low.
During validation Lead Finder checks syntax, domain, and MX records, and filters out disposable and risky addresses. Each lead then shows a clear status and a deliverability score, so you can decide which mailboxes to keep.
Validation is optional and on demand - that's deliberate, so you control your credit spend. You can run it in two places:
Inside Lead Finder, as the fourth phase, by selecting leads and running Verify before you export or push them.
Later, at campaign import. When you import leads into a MailBeast campaign, verification is available there too - so if you skipped it in Lead Finder, you can still validate before your first send.
Validation costs 0.5 credit per email.
Open Lead Finder at app.mailbeast.ai/lead-finder.
Describe your audience in plain language (e.g. "Roofing Contractors in Berlin") and confirm the search Lead Finder built.
Watch Discovery run. Businesses stream into your table in real time. You can keep working while the list fills.
Find emails. Select the businesses you want (or all of them) and press Find Emails to pull verified-ready contact addresses and free phone numbers.
Validate (optional). Run Verify on your selection to score deliverability, or leave it for the campaign-import step.
Use your leads. Push the selected leads into a MailBeast campaign in one click, or export them as a CSV for your own workflow.
Everything in Lead Finder runs on one simple credit balance:
Action | Cost |
|---|---|
Discover a company | ~0.25-0.75 credit (cheaper on higher tiers) |
Find an email | 1 credit |
Verify an email | 0.5 credit |
AI action (e.g. building a search) | 1 credit |
Phone number & address | Free |
A fully enriched, validated lead works out to about 2 credits depending on your tier.
Credits roll over. As long as your Lead Finder plan stays active, unused credits carry from one cycle to the next and never expire. On annual billing, a full year of credits is granted upfront.
Higher tiers are cheaper. Larger plans add more credits and lower the per-company discovery cost.
Optional fallback to your email plan. Lead Finder credits are always used first. If you also have an Email Outreach plan and run low, certain actions can fall back to its allowances - AI actions draw on your AI credits, and email verification draws on your email-validation credits. The two products otherwise stay independent.
See your balance and usage any time on the Lead Finder page.
Be specific about the business type. "Family dentists in Chicago" or "boutique fitness studios in Miami" produces a cleaner list than a broad category.
Start narrow, then widen. Run a town search before city or before a whole state or country, so you can sanity-check the results before spending more credits.
Find emails in bulk. Once Discovery looks right, run Find Emails across the whole list rather than one row at a time.
Validate before your first send. Whether in Lead Finder or at campaign import, verifying upfront keeps your bounce rate and sender reputation healthy.
Do I have to find emails and validate for every business? No. Discovery runs automatically, but Email Search and Validation are on demand. You choose which businesses to enrich and verify, so you only spend credits where you intend to.
Is Lead Finder part of my email plan? No - it's a separate product with its own subscription and credits. An Email Outreach plan can optionally extend it once Lead Finder credits are exhausted (AI and verification only).
Open Lead Finder and run your first search.
Once your list is ready, push it into a campaign and start your sequence.
