We said MAYBE on August 22, 2026. Not settled — due August 22, 2027.
Read this with the caveat. We tested the engine that produced this verdict against 292 launches whose outcomes we already knew, and could not show it predicted which survived. Some of its data sources were also dead at the time of scoring. The verdict stays up, dated and unedited, because a record you can quietly revise is not a record — but it is worth less than it looked when it was written.
Demand is real but entirely inferred from incumbent revenue, not from anyone asking for this specific product — zero Reddit signal and no keywords means you'd be launching into a market you must educate and outspend. The wedge on offer is a cheaper free tier against companies whose moat is data volume, which is the worst axis to compete on as a solo founder. Weak SKIP unless you narrow hard to a developer API on genuinely open registry data, where the engineering is tractable and buyers self-serve.
Four established competitors are successfully charging real money ($99-499/mo and up) for lead data, which is proven commercial demand — but every discovery channel here is silent: no Reddit posts, no strong keywords, and the HN hits are tangential (model scanning, cold outreach anecdotes) rather than people asking for an open-data lead scanner.
The incumbents are not indie shops — Apollo and ZoomInfo are heavily funded data businesses whose moat is proprietary contact data volume and freshness, which is a capital and data-network problem a solo founder cannot outship; the listed gaps (free tier, transparency, privacy-first) are positioning, not defensible product, and 'more free leads' is the one wedge with no revenue path.
The strongest case for building: 'lead data via a clean, cheap, documented REST API' is genuinely underserved — every incumbent sells seats to sales teams, not per-call access to developers and indie hackers, and public registries plus GitHub/company-registry APIs can produce firmographic leads legally without buying a contact database. A developer-first API with per-lead pricing could reach $2-5k MRR with no paid acquisition, since developers find APIs through docs, SEO and HN rather than sales demos.
What is worth more than this page. The register records what became of 6,266 real launches. No engine has to be right for that to be true.