How to build a lead list of companies that use your competitor

Lead generation and qualification in a single search. Enter your competitor once and anVendor returns the companies actually paying for it — each row a lead qualified by current use, with adoption and estimated annual spend attached.

It is also the shortest route to an accurate answer. anVendor does not guess from what a prospect's website loads, or model the answer from companies that resemble them. It looks for evidence that this company holds an account with this vendor, then prices that account against the vendor's own published plans. Live scans qualify the leads; vendor plans size the deal, in the same search.

The quick version

1. Open the leads search on your account and type your competitor — a name or a domain.
2. Search. Discovering companies is free and unlimited on every plan, including Free.
3. Read the table: one row per company, with headcount, how far the tool has spread inside it, and estimated annual spend on it.
4. Add a location, industry or size filter to reach companies we have not scanned yet, and Reveal the ones you care about — 0.25 credits each, refunded if we find nothing.
5. Export to CSV, Excel or PDF and work the list.

What you are actually getting

anVendor does not look for your competitor's tag on a prospect's website, and it does not infer usage from job ads or from what companies of a similar size tend to buy. It analyzes vendor services alongside publicly available information and looks for the signs that a specific company holds an account with a specific service. What it reports is evidence of the account itself.

Three things follow from that, and they are the reason the list is worth working:

• SaaS behind the login is visible. CRM, HR, ticketing, design, documents, code hosting, storage, meetings. None of it touches a marketing site, and for most companies it is the larger part of subscription spend.
• You get depth, not a yes/no. Because the evidence is at account level, a row can show how far the tool has actually spread inside the company. Two seats and a company-wide rollout are entirely different conversations.
• You get a price from the vendor's own price list. Every spend figure is matched against the tiers on that vendor's public pricing page — each stored with its source URL and the date we checked it — so you can size a deal before the first call.

Step by step

Step 1 — Open the leads search

Sign in and open Search leads on your account. The home page carries the same tab as a public demo, but it is limited to a set of featured services and has no filters; the account version searches the whole catalogue. A Free account is enough to follow every step here.

Step 2 — Type your competitor

A product name or a domain both work — GitHub or github.com. The field is a typeahead over hundreds of tracked services and ranks exact matches first, so the vendor you mean is usually the first row. One detail worth knowing: picking a suggestion fills the box and stops there. It does not search. The filters sit directly underneath and are part of the same question, so searching on the pick would fire against whatever they happened to hold. On the keyboard that means two presses of Enter — the first fills from the highlighted row, the second searches.

Step 3 — Discover companies, which is free

Discovering companies is unlimited and costs nothing on every plan. Credits pay for answers about a particular company, never for the query, so you can try five spellings of a vendor's name and three different competitors before you spend anything. Run the searches first; decide what to reveal afterwards.

Step 4 — Read the table

One row per company. The header above it names the service and states how many of the companies listed have already been scanned and how many have not. If you would rather see the shape of a result before signing up, the per-service pages list companies for a couple of dozen well-known tools alongside each vendor's published plans.

• Company — name, domain and location. The name links out to the company's site.
• Size — headcount, where we have it.
• Adoption — how far the service has spread inside that company, as a percentage. This is the column that separates a pilot from a standard.
• Est. spend — estimated annual spend on that one service, shown as a floor such as "$48k+ / yr" rather than a false precision.

Every column sorts. Results page at 100 rows, and rows you have already paid for sort to the top of the list rather than scattering among rows you cannot read yet.

Step 5 — Widen the list with the filters

Location, industry and company size sit under the input, and whether you set one changes what the search reaches:

• No filters — you get the companies currently found paying for the service. Fast, and every row is one we have observed.
• Any filter set — the search widens past that into companies we have not scanned yet. This is how you turn "who uses my competitor" into "SaaS companies in Spain with 51 to 200 staff who use my competitor", which is a territory list rather than a sample.

Location takes a country and, if you want one, a city; you can add several. Setting a filter back to its default puts you back on the first path — nothing is sticky, and nothing runs until you press Search.

Step 6 — Reveal the companies you care about

A company we have not yet checked for that service shows redacted adoption and spend, with a Reveal button. Revealing costs 0.25 credits — a quarter of what analyzing a whole company costs — and covers both cases behind one button: reading an answer we already hold, and going to look when we do not. Which of the two it is decides how long you wait: an answer we hold comes back at once, a fresh look usually takes minutes, and a whole-company analysis is unbounded — an hour or more is normal for a large domain. Nothing blocks the page while it runs.

• Reveal selected takes the rows you tick on the page you are looking at, up to a hundred at a time.
• Reveal all takes the whole list instead — every company the search can reach, including the pages you have not scrolled to, up to 10,000. anVendor prices it server-side first, then works through it in the background: you can close the tab, and its frame shows how many have been processed, how many were detected, and what has been charged so far. Every reveal — one company, the selected page, or the whole list — gets its own frame; several can run at once, and an identical Reveal all is not started twice while it is running.
• Nothing is charged on the first click. A confirmation quotes the total before anything is spent, because revealing a full page is 25 credits and a control that spends that on a mis-click would be a trap however clearly it is labelled. Reveal all prices the list the same way, then holds that price or your whole balance, whichever is smaller — a hold, not a charge, and the reason a balance too small for the whole list shortens the run rather than blocking it. Each company draws its 0.25 as it is checked; a company checked without a detection hands its 0.25 straight back to the run and the next company on the list spends it, so a run routinely reaches further than the balance it started with. Whatever the job never reaches is released when it ends.
• Not found means not charged. If we look and there is no evidence of that subscription, the row says so and the credits are refunded automatically.

Step 7 — Open the service card

The service name above the results opens a card with its category, its website, and its published price ladder — the tiers every spend figure on the rows beneath is matched against. Worth a look before you quote a number to anyone: it is what makes the estimates readable.

Step 8 — Export

Every search is saved to your account's history, and exports to CSV, Excel or PDF. That is how the list gets into your CRM or your sequencer instead of staying in a browser tab. The history filters the same way the search does — narrow a service's past results by company size or by estimated spend band before you export, so a rep gets their segment rather than the whole run.

If we do not cover that service yet

Your search is recorded as a request and prioritized — an unknown vendor that people keep searching for is exactly how coverage grows. In the meantime you get one of two things, depending on which kind of miss it was: a spelling suggestion when the query looks like a typo, or a short list of other tools in the same category that do carry companies when the vendor is real but the list is empty.

What it costs

• Discovering companies: free and unlimited on every plan.
• Reveal one company on one service: 0.25 credits, refunded if nothing is found. Reveal selected and Reveal all cost the same per company — 0.25 each, quoted as a total before you confirm.
• Analyze a whole company: 1 credit — every service it subscribes to, ranked by estimated annual spend.
• Free plan: $0, with 3 credits per 30 days, unlimited company discovery and full history.
• Subscriptions: Starter is 30 credits for $99 a month, Growth is 100 for $299, and Scale is 400 for $999.
• Credit packs: Small is 30 credits for $99, Medium is 100 for $299, and Large is 400 for $999. They never expire.

Working the list once you have it

• Sort by adoption before you sort by logo. A company at 3 percent adoption is running a pilot or a single team; one at 80 percent has standardized on it. The first is a displacement conversation and the second is a renewal-timing conversation, and the same email does not work for both.
• Sort by spend to size the deal — and to decide which accounts justify a sequence at all rather than a one-line note.
• Run it in the other direction on your best accounts. Enter the company itself instead of the service and you get the rest of what it subscribes to. That tells you what your product would have to sit beside, which integrations matter, and which budget line you are really competing with.
• Filter into territories, then export per segment — one file per rep beats one file with a country column.
• Skip the category education. Someone already paying your competitor has been sold the category. Your first line is the delta, not the problem.

What the list will not tell you

• It is not a contact list. You get companies, adoption and spend. Names and email addresses are a different tool's job.
• It is not an invoice. Spend is built from the vendor's published list prices and the seats we found. List prices are not negotiated prices, and a large company rarely pays them — which is why the figure is shown as a floor.
• It is not a renewal date. Nothing public tells you when a contract is up. Adoption depth is the closest proxy you will get.
• It is not exhaustive. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Where a vendor's service offers no public sign, we report nothing rather than guess, so a service missing from a result means no evidence found, not not used.
• It is not frozen. Data ages. Every cached result carries its date, a fresh scan is one click away, and a company we stop finding drops out of the list for that service rather than sitting in it forever.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find companies that use a specific SaaS service?

Open the leads search, enter the service by name or domain, and press Search. You get the companies currently found paying for it, each with headcount, adoption and estimated spend. Discovering companies is free on every plan; credits are only spent when you reveal a particular company's adoption and spend.

Does discovering companies cost credits?

No. Discovering companies is unlimited and free on every plan, including Free. Credits pay for answers about a particular company — 0.25 to reveal one customer and its estimated spend, 1 to analyze all of a company's subscriptions — never for running a query.

What does Reveal actually show me?

Adoption and estimated annual spend for that one company on that one service. It costs 0.25 credits, you can reveal up to a hundred rows at once, a confirmation quotes the total before anything is charged, and if we look and find no evidence of the subscription you are not charged.

Why are some companies in the list greyed out?

Those are companies we have not checked for that service yet — they appear because a filter widened the search beyond what has been scanned. Their adoption and spend are redacted until you reveal them. Rows we already hold an answer for are readable straight away.

Can I filter by country, industry or company size?

Yes, in the same search box. Leave the filters alone and you get the companies already known to pay for the service. Set a location, an industry or a headcount range and the search widens to companies we have not scanned yet. Discovering companies is free either way.

What if anVendor does not track my competitor yet?

The search is recorded as a request and prioritized. You will also get a spelling suggestion if the query looks like a typo, or a short list of other tools in the same category if the vendor is real but we hold no companies for it yet.

How do you estimate what a company pays?

Each result is priced against the vendor's own published plan ladder: the tiers on their public pricing page, each stored with the source URL and the date we checked it. The seats we find are matched to the tier that fits, and the result is shown as a floor — "$48k+ / yr". It is an estimate from public list prices, never an invoice or a negotiated rate.

How current is the data?

Every cached result carries the date it was observed, and a fresh scan is one click away. A service we stop finding for a company drops out of that company's results, so you are not looking at a subscription that lapsed a year ago.

Where does the data come from, and is this legal?

anVendor analyzes vendor services alongside publicly available information and looks for the signs that a company holds an account with a given service. The method is proprietary and we do not describe it, but the boundary is stated plainly: it operates only on information we are lawfully entitled to process, it never reaches into private, password-protected or otherwise access-restricted systems, it circumvents no technical protection, and it uses no browser extension, SDK or tracking script. What you do with the list afterwards is governed by the marketing and privacy rules of your jurisdiction.

Can I export the results?

Yes. Every search is saved to your account history and exports to CSV, Excel or PDF.

Is there an API?

Not yet. Results are delivered in the app, with a full search history on your account and CSV, Excel and PDF export.

Start with one search

Pick the competitor you lose the most deals to, run it through the leads search, and sort the result by adoption. The companies at the bottom of that column are running a pilot someone inside them is still arguing about — and that is the list to work first. It costs nothing to find out.

Weighing this against a website scanner, a job-ad tool or a modelled provider? Those comparisons are written up separately — what each one observes, where each goes quiet, and which to reach for when.