Looking for an Apollo.io alternative that actually works?

Hey Bravado fam,

This is gonna get a bit technical, not sure if this is the right forum to ask this but figure what better crowd to ask than all of you sales experts!

My company recently started experimenting with cold email campaigns for the first time and decided to use Apollo.io because it looked like a promising end-to-end solution: from prospecting, to generating personalized emails, to delivering and tracking metrics of your campaign (and because Zoominfo at $15k per seat feels outrageous for us at this stage).

I’m now 4,000+ emails deep and I’ve ran into the following problems:

1)Their verified emails are not actually verified. Although Apollo offers you ‘verified’ emails, using their verified emails exclusively still results in 5%+ bounce rates

• Chatting with some SDRs they mentioned this is common and they pay for additional tools to verify emails from Apollo

2) They offer a ton of filters but their data is not always up to date. For example we’ve been filtering by years of experience and have consistently found the data to be inaccurate when compared to LinkedIn, often times because they have the incomplete work history of your leads

• Shameless plug but we actually deployed a LinkedIn scraper to usedouble.com specifically to gather up to date info and have more control over our ICP

3) When a domain blocks your emails, Apollo is not smart enough to stop sending emails to other addresses in the same domain. It just keeps trying and they just keep bouncing. Feels like some simple logic could be implemented to circumvent this issue

4) Even though Apollo knows who reads your emails, who replies to them, the sentiment of their reply, and the full profile of the person (name, company, job title, location, years of experience, etc), it is somehow not able to suggest a target persona that resonates best with your message. Not that they promise to do this but it feels trivially easy to do given all of the information they have

Do other Apollo users share my frustrations? Am I using it wrong? Is there a better product out there?

Thank you :)