--- name: hiring-signal-to-outbound description: Turn job postings into sequenced outbound: TheirStack for the signal, Apollo search plus Findymail for the people, Smartlead for sending. Use when the user wants hiring triggers, job-posting signal, or an outbound motion with a reason to reach out attached. --- # Hiring signal to outbound > Generated from https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/stack-hiring-signal > Every price and limit below was read from the vendor's own pricing page or docs. Hit rates are modeled, and labeled where they appear. **Tools in this stack:** TheirStack, Apollo API, Findymail, Smartlead. **Build effort:** Days. **What it costs:** $0.13 per mailable contact, $281 per 1,000 companies. ## What you are building A scheduled job, not an agent. A nightly signal query with a 14-day posting window, deduped against companies already processed, three contacts per company, and the posting text carried all the way into the send so the first line has something true to say. ## Check your product maps to a role somebody hires for Sales tooling maps to SDR and AE postings, developer tooling to backend and platform roles, compliance software to a first GRC hire. If you cannot name the job title that implies your problem, this stack has no trigger and technographics are the better signal. The second test is timing: you need to act inside two weeks, because at 60 days the company has already hired and the reference makes you look slow. ## Prerequisites | What | Where to get it | Notes | |---|---|---| | TheirStack API key | https://theirstack.com/ | $49/mo. A free trial with company and API credits, no card required | | Apollo API key | https://www.apollo.io/ | $49/seat/mo. Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | | Findymail API key | https://www.findymail.com/ | $99/mo. A free account with 10 credits and no card, which this directory counts as a trial rather than a free tier | | Smartlead API key | https://www.smartlead.ai/ | $39/mo. No free tier. Free trial, no card. API access starts at the Pro plan. | | A scheduler and a store of processed companies | n8n, a cron job, or your warehouse | Dedupe is what keeps the nightly run cheap | | A sending domain that is already warm | Your sending infrastructure | This stack produces volume; it does not fix deliverability | ## The tools, and how to call them ### TheirStack - **Docs:** https://api.theirstack.com/ - **Auth:** Bearer token - **Rate limits:** Published per plan, with a documented bulk search endpoint - **Entry price:** $49/mo. Free tier: A free trial with company and API credits, no card required - **Unit cost:** $0.109 per company credit - **MCP server:** `https://api.theirstack.com/mcp` Endpoint paths are not reproduced here because we have not verified them from this vendor's docs. Read the docs link above before writing the call. Prices, limits and auth read from the vendor's own pages on 2026-10-17. ### Apollo API - **Docs:** https://docs.apollo.io/ - **Auth:** API key in the x-api-key header - **Rate limits:** 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. - **Entry price:** $49/seat/mo. Free tier: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month - **Unit cost:** $0.0196 per credit - **MCP server:** `https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp` | Call | What it does | |---|---| | `POST https://api.apollo.io/api/v1/people/match` | Person enrichment from an email, name plus domain, or LinkedIn URL. 1 credit, or 9 when a mobile is revealed. | Prices, limits and auth read from the vendor's own pages on 2026-10-19. ### Findymail - **Docs:** https://app.findymail.com/docs/ - **Auth:** Bearer token - **Rate limits:** Published per plan in the docs, not on the pricing page - **Entry price:** $99/mo. Free tier: A free account with 10 credits and no card, which this directory counts as a trial rather than a free tier - **Unit cost:** $0.0198 per credit Endpoint paths are not reproduced here because we have not verified them from this vendor's docs. Read the docs link above before writing the call. Prices, limits and auth read from the vendor's own pages on 2026-10-14. ### Smartlead - **Docs:** https://api.smartlead.ai/reference/introduction - **Auth:** API key as a query parameter - **Rate limits:** 60 req/min and 1,000/hour per key, 120 and 3,000 on Pro. Three endpoints capped at 10 a minute on top. - **Entry price:** $39/mo. Free tier: No free tier. Free trial, no card. API access starts at the Pro plan. - **Unit cost:** Not sold by the unit - **MCP server:** `https://mcp.smartlead.ai/sse` Endpoint paths are not reproduced here because we have not verified them from this vendor's docs. Read the docs link above before writing the call. Prices, limits and auth read from the vendor's own pages on 2026-10-19. ## Build it ### 1. Schedule the signal query, not the enrichment Run the job-posting query nightly with a 14-day window and dedupe against companies you have already processed. Credits only burn on new companies, so a nightly job over a stable market costs a fraction of the first run. Never re-enrich a company you already have. ### 2. Keep search and enrichment as separate steps People search costs nothing and enrichment costs credits. Put a filter between them, even a crude one on seniority and department. Chaining search straight into enrichment pays for every marginal person the search returned, which is usually double what you wanted. ### 3. Carry the posting text through the whole pipeline The job title, the location and the posting date are what make the first line work. If they are dropped between the signal step and the sending step you have built an expensive way to send a generic email. Pass them as custom fields all the way into the sequencer. ### 4. Take the buying committee, not one contact The signal cost is fixed per company, so spreading it across three contacts puts it at $0.132 a mailable contact where one contact lands nearer $0.32. Take the function owner, the operations owner and the hiring manager named on the posting. ### 5. Cap the daily credit spend A bad filter that matches 40,000 companies instead of 1,000 costs $4,360 rather than $109, and it will do it in about four minutes. Set a hard ceiling on the signal provider's balance and alert on it. This is the single most expensive mistake available in this stack. ## Gotchas - A filter that is too broad. The cost here scales with companies matched, and it fails fast and expensively. - Re-processing companies you have already seen, which turns a cheap nightly job into the first run every night. - Running it once rather than weekly. Postings are a flow, not a stock, so a single run gives you a backlog of stale triggers. - Dropping the posting fields before the send, which removes the only reason the email is not generic. - Enriching one contact per company, which leaves the fixed signal cost sitting on a single row. ## How to verify it works - Run the job twice in a row. The second run should spend close to nothing, which proves the dedupe works. - Open a lead in the sequencer and confirm the job title, location and posting date arrived as custom fields. - Trip the credit ceiling deliberately in a sandbox and confirm the alert fires before the balance moves. - Check the posting-age filter against a known old posting: anything past 14 days should not appear. - Count contacts per company in the output. Below two, the economics of the signal step stop working. ## What this costs to run | Measure | Figure | |---|---| | per mailable contact | $0.13 | | per 1,000 companies | $281 | | TheirStack entry | $49/mo | | Apollo entry | $49/seat/mo | | Findymail entry | $99/mo | | Smartlead entry | $39/mo | Rates are the providers' published entry-plan prices. Where a workload is modeled, the hit rates behind it are assumptions, not promises: no provider in this category publishes a match rate you can hold them to. Measure your own on 500 rows before you plan against these numbers. ## Sources - TheirStack: https://api.theirstack.com/ - Apollo API: https://docs.apollo.io/ - Findymail: https://app.findymail.com/docs/ - Smartlead: https://api.smartlead.ai/reference/introduction - This stack, with the arithmetic and the reasoning behind each step: https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/stack-hiring-signal --- *Published by Frontal, the go-to-market partner for B2B tech companies past product-market fit. Where a vendor publishes no public rate, this file says so rather than estimating.*