Apollo raised its prices again in January. The Professional plan went from $79 to $99 per month. Enterprise, already expensive, crept up further. ZoomInfo's contracts have been quietly shifting toward annual lock-ins with minimum commitments that would make a mobile phone provider blush. Lusha added usage caps. Cognism restructured its pricing tiers.
None of this is surprising. Subscription data providers follow the same playbook as every SaaS company: acquire customers with reasonable pricing, build dependency, then increase costs once switching feels too painful. If your B2B prospect data sits inside someone else's platform, you're renting the most important asset in your sales operation.
This is the year that approach stops making sense for most SMEs.
Let's do the maths that data providers hope you don't do.
Apollo Professional at $99/month gives you 5,000 email credits per month and 60,000 per year. That's $1,188 a year for up to 60,000 contacts, which sounds reasonable until you think about what you actually get: email addresses with 85% to 90% reported accuracy, basic firmographic data, and job titles that may or may not be current.
Now stretch that forward. After three years, you've spent $3,564. The data you exported last year has already degraded by 30% or more (industry standard decay rates for B2B data). The contacts you downloaded in year one are substantially worthless by year three. But the subscription keeps going, because you need fresh data to replace the stale data. It's a treadmill.
ZoomInfo is worse. Their contracts typically start around £12,000 to £15,000 per year for SME-level access. Over three years, that's £36,000 to £45,000. For that money, you get access to their database (which is genuinely good, credit where it's due), but the moment you cancel, you lose API access, your CRM integration stops enriching, and the data you exported starts decaying with no refresh.
You never owned any of it. You rented a view.
Building a prospect database from primary sources takes longer. It requires more effort upfront. It's not as simple as typing a job title into a search bar and hitting export. But the result is an asset you own permanently, that nobody can take away, and that nobody else has.
Here's how we built a database of 12,600+ contacts for a warehouse management software company, from scratch, without a single data subscription.
Companies House was the foundation. Free, public, and comprehensive. Every active UK company files at Companies House. Using SIC codes, we identified companies in five target sectors (food distribution, automotive parts, e-commerce fulfilment, pharmaceutical logistics, and general warehousing). We filtered by company size using filing thresholds, employee count where available, and incorporation date to exclude dormant shells. That gave us roughly 8,000 target companies.
LinkedIn provided the people. For each company, we identified operations directors, warehouse managers, supply chain heads, and IT directors. Not by scraping (LinkedIn doesn't take kindly to that), but through careful, manual-style research augmented by tools that speed up the process without violating terms of service. Names, job titles, confirmation of current employment.
Industry directories filled the gaps. Trade associations, exhibition attendee lists from logistics conferences, and sector-specific databases added companies and contacts that didn't appear in the first two sources. Some of the best prospects came from the most niche directories, companies that were too small for ZoomInfo but perfectly sized for the client's product.
Email pattern verification was the final step. For each contact, we generated likely email addresses based on the company's email convention (firstname.lastname@domain, firstname@domain, and so on). Then we verified each address through deliverability testing before adding it to the database. This step alone eliminated roughly 2,400 addresses that would have bounced.
Total time: about six weeks. Total cost to the client: substantially less than a single year of ZoomInfo. And they own every contact, permanently.
Three things changed this year that make data ownership more urgent than it was twelve months ago.
First, the subscription platforms are consolidating and raising prices. Apollo acquiring LeadIQ's dataset, ZoomInfo integrating Chorus, Cognism buying Kaspr. Fewer players, less competition, higher prices. If you're dependent on a platform that gets acquired, you're at the mercy of the new owner's pricing strategy.
Second, deliverability requirements tightened. Google and Yahoo's new sender requirements (enforced from February 2024) mean that email verification is no longer optional, it's mandatory. Lists purchased from data brokers with 85% accuracy send 15% of your emails to invalid addresses, and that tanks your sender reputation. When you build and verify your own data, you control the quality threshold.
Third, AI tools have made the build process faster. Companies House data extraction that used to take days now takes hours. Email pattern generation and verification is largely automated. The manual research component, the part that requires human judgement and industry knowledge, is still manual. But the mechanical parts have been dramatically accelerated. The economics of building versus buying have shifted in favour of building.
I'm not ideological about this. For some businesses, a data subscription makes sense, at least temporarily.
If you're entering a new market and need to test messaging before investing in a full data build, a month of Apollo can give you a cheap test list. If you need US data and your business is UK-based, building from Companies House obviously doesn't apply. If your target market is so large (100,000+ companies) that building from scratch is impractical, subscription data might be the right foundation, supplemented by your own enrichment and verification.
But for most UK B2B businesses targeting a defined market of 1,000 to 20,000 companies, building is better. You get higher accuracy, better deliverability, unique data that your competitors don't have, and an asset that appreciates with maintenance rather than depreciating with neglect.
A built database isn't maintenance-free. People change jobs. Companies get acquired. New businesses enter your target market. You need a process for keeping the data fresh.
We recommend quarterly verification sweeps where every email address gets re-tested. Monthly enrichment for your top-tier prospects, adding new contacts at the same companies, updating job titles, noting company news that might create an opening for conversation. And ongoing additions as new companies appear in your target sectors.
This maintenance takes a fraction of the time and cost of the initial build. Think of it as servicing an engine versus buying a new car every year. The build gives you the asset. The maintenance keeps it running.
The businesses I work with that own their data make better decisions, run more targeted campaigns, and spend less per acquired customer than the businesses renting data from platforms. It's not close. The gap widens every year as subscription costs rise and data quality expectations increase.
If you're on a data subscription right now, ask yourself: if I cancelled tomorrow, what would I actually own? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, it might be time to start building.
Martin Dugan, AA2
