For as long as B2B sales has existed, a usable lead has been expensive. An insurance agent buying from EverQuote, QuoteWizard, or Bold Penguin pays $40 to $200 per name, and most of those names are shared with three to five competing agents. A merchant services rep buying from a list broker pays $30 to $75 per record, and the data is often months stale. A marketing agency paying for a ZoomInfo seat sits at $15,000 to $30,000 a year before they have made a single call.
We thought there was a better way to do this. The reason the old prices held for so long was simple: building a fresh, verified, contactable lead was genuinely hard. Somebody had to monitor public records. Somebody had to figure out what the business actually does. Somebody had to find a phone number that worked, an email that was not bouncing, and a website that was real. That work historically required a junior researcher, an offshore data team, or a salesperson burning their morning. The cost got passed through to the buyer, and the market accepted it.
DayOneLead was built on the bet that a new kind of scraper, one piloted not by hand-tuned scripts but by reasoning models running real browser sessions, could do that work better and at a fraction of the cost. This post is a look at what that pipeline has produced so far in Florida, and what it has not.
The inventory today
We have ingested every business filing the state of Florida has produced over the past year. Each one travels through our enrichment pipeline, where an AI classifier reads the entity name, an AI-piloted browser hunts down the business across the open web, and a verification layer confirms the contact information before the record becomes a deliverable lead.
The funnel from raw filing to highest-quality deliverable looks like this:
A few things stand out. We hold 828,542 raw business filings. Of those, 746,086 have made it through the full enrichment pipeline as lead records, a 90 percent throughput rate end to end. 165,274 carry a verified website, our broadest signal of digital presence. 98,803 carry a verified phone number or a verified email, the threshold at which a salesperson can act on a lead today. And 56,961 carry both a verified phone and a verified email, our highest deliverable tier.
That last bar is the number we care about most. A name without a way to reach it is a research artifact. A name with a phone and an email is a sales opportunity that a customer can put in a CRM tonight and call tomorrow morning.
What kind of businesses these are
Florida's new-business mix is more varied than the headline categories suggest. Holding companies and unclassifiable shells make up a meaningful slice of the inventory and we exclude them from the chart below to focus on operating businesses our customers actually sell into.
The lighter bar is total leads in the category. The darker bar is the subset for which we have recovered a phone or email. A few patterns:
- Contractors are by far the largest contactable category, with more than nine thousand reachable owners across roofing, HVAC, electrical, and general construction. This is a signal of how durable the trades market is in Florida and why insurance agents, payment processors, and equipment vendors all chase this segment.
- Real estate filings are massive in raw count but thin on contact rate, because many are special-purpose LLCs formed around a single transaction with no operating phone line.
- Healthcare punches above its weight on contact recovery, because new clinics, dental practices, and physical therapy offices put a real phone number on a real website almost immediately.
- Restaurants and retail show the steady drumbeat of small storefronts opening across the state, every one of them a buyer for general liability, point-of-sale, and local marketing services.
Daily flow
The Florida pipeline runs every day. April 2026 was a representative month: thirty days, more than 60,000 filings, and the bursty rhythm of state filing batches rolling in.
A few things to note. Filings cluster on weekdays and crater on weekends, exactly as you would expect from a state office. The peak day in April was the 20th at almost 5,000 filings. The average across the month was just over 2,000 new filings per day. For a single salesperson working a county or two, that volume is unworkable by hand. Our pipeline turns that wave into a curated short list of ten to fifteen leads in their email by 7 a.m. local time.
How this gets done without an army of researchers
The cost story is the part that surprises people. Across the entire production stack last month, our external service spend came in at roughly $246. That covers every filing ingested, every business classified, every browser session that went out onto the open web, and every contact verification call. Per filing, we are spending fractions of a cent.
The savings come from one architectural decision we made at the start: we do not write hand-tuned scrapers. We pilot real browsers with reasoning models.
A traditional scraper is a brittle script. Somebody writes code that says "click this button, wait for this element, parse this table." When the target site changes, which happens constantly, the script breaks and a human has to rebuild it. That model never scales across thousands of business directories, social profiles, and small business websites, each of which is its own moving target.
What we run instead are real Chromium sessions on real machines, controlled by language models. The model sees the page the way a human researcher would. It scrolls. It clicks. It waits for content to load. It reads the contact page even when the contact page is hidden three navigation layers deep, behind a JavaScript modal, or rendered only after a cookie banner is dismissed. When a site reaches for the usual bot-detection signals, mouse jitter, render timing, browser fingerprint coherence, the AI-piloted session passes them because the session is not a script. It is an actual browser, driven by a model that decides how to navigate the page in the moment.
This is the part that quietly does the most work. The traditional approach to bot defense, blocklists of headless-browser fingerprints and rate limits keyed to mechanical traffic, is built to defeat scripts. It is much less effective against an LLM-driven session that arrives, reads, and leaves the way a single curious human would. The result is that we recover contact information from corners of the web that a typical scraper stack simply cannot reach, at a per-page cost that no offshore research team can match.
We pair that browser layer with a classifier that reads each entity's name, address, and entity type and assigns it a category and sub-category. Today the inventory carries more than 20,000 distinct AI-classified business categories, fine-grained enough to distinguish "Italian Restaurant" from "Sushi" from "Cafe." That granularity is what lets a customer say "show me only new full-service restaurants in Hillsborough County" and get a clean answer the next morning.
What the numbers mean for our customers
The unit economics show up directly in the price. Our subscriptions are $99 a month for Starter and $199 a month for Pro, with full enrichment, daily AI-matched email digests, unlimited filtering, and CSV export included at every tier. The closest direct competitor in this space gates enrichment to a $499 enterprise plan. We include it on the entry tier because we can afford to.
For the customer, the payback math is decisive. A commercial insurance agent who closes a single new account earns $1,000 to $5,000 in lifetime commission. A CPA who lands one small business client carries that relationship at $5,000 to $35,000 in lifetime fees. A merchant services agent earns $1,200 to $2,500 per signed merchant. The subscription is paid back on the first deal. Every subsequent deal is gross margin against a per-lead cost that no traditional vendor in this category can match.
Where we deliberately keep the human in the loop
This part matters as much as the cost story. AI-piloted browsers are exceptional at the parts of the workflow that are repetitive, structured, and currently eating the customer's morning. They are not a replacement for the conversation that closes a deal.
We made a deliberate decision early on not to automate cold emails, auto-dialers, or generated personalized openers. Those technologies exist and they are inexpensive to add. We left them out because the customers we serve sell into tight local communities where reputation is the entire game. An insurance agent in a Tampa neighborhood cannot afford to be the seventh person that week sending a robot-written email to a brand-new restaurant owner. The lead is the leverage. The conversation is the agent's.
What our customers consistently tell us is that the value of the platform is not "the AI does my sales for me," it is "the AI lets me show up first, prepared, and relevant on a real call." The pipeline gets them to the doorstep with the context they need. They ring the bell.
What is next
Florida is one state. We are building out Texas, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arizona over the next two quarters. Each new state plugs into the same AI-piloted browser fleet, the same classifier, the same daily delivery rail. The numbers in this post should look much larger by the time we publish the next one.
If you are a salesperson, an agency owner, or a researcher who would benefit from this data in your geography or your vertical, we would like to hear from you. The data is more useful in your hands than ours.