Apollo gives you 275 million contacts and says go fish. DealStringer reads the database for you and files three to seven stories every morning, each one with a real trigger event and a drafted cold email. From $49 per rep per month.
275M contacts. You query, you filter, you build lists. Then you write the email. Then the next rep on your team builds the same list, with slightly different filters, because there's no shared editorial view of what mattered today.
Three to seven curated stories every morning. Each one has a verified trigger event, a real buyer, and a drafted cold email in your voice. You read the File. You send. You sell.
Apollo built a search engine. DealStringer built an editorial process. They solve different problems and you can use both.
| APOLLO.IO | DEALSTRINGER | |
|---|---|---|
| What you receive | A list of contacts matching your filters, refreshed when you re-query. | 3 to 7 verified stories in your inbox every weekday morning at 06:30 ET. Plus a Kill Log of what we dropped. |
| Why each lead matters | You decide. Apollo doesn't tell you whether a contact is in market or warm. | Every story has a trigger event — new exec hire, M&A close, RFP posting, breach disclosure, funding round, compliance deadline. |
| Cold email drafting | Sequencer module included on Apollo's middle tiers. You write the templates. | Drafted in your voice. Rep Pass Pro and above. Trained on customer-selected templates plus pasted examples; sharpens with feedback. |
| Editorial review | None. Contact data is what it is. | A real editor reads every File on Enterprise tier. AI editor on lower tiers, plus Kill Log on every tier. |
| Entry pricing | Apollo Basic from ~$49 per user per month (limited credits). | $49 per rep per month (Rep Pass). No credits. Three curated stories every morning, every day. |
| Team-level intelligence | Every rep queries individually. Shared lists possible but not curated. | Manager-Triage mode on Team Desk and above. One File goes to the manager; manager re-files stories to specific reps. |
| Login / dashboard | Web app, Chrome extension, mobile. | None. The product is the email. Update your beat via magic-link in any File. |
| Setup time | Onboarding flow, filter saving, sequencer config. | ~6 minutes to fill The Brief, one time. First File ships the next morning. |
A lot of our customers run Apollo and DealStringer in parallel. Each tool earns its keep for a different reason. Here's how to think about it.
Read the actual sample File we file for a Bay Area cybersecurity VAR. Three real stories with full trigger event, contact intel, and drafted cold email. No login.
If you're moving off Apollo or running both side by side, these are the four that come up first.
Apollo is a contact database. You query, filter, and contact. DealStringer is an editorial brief. We read the public record and file 3 to 7 curated stories every morning, each with a verified trigger event and a drafted cold email. You read; you don't search.
DealStringer Rep Pass starts at $49 per rep per month, the same entry point as Apollo's Basic. The difference is what you get for it: Apollo gives a contact quota; DealStringer files curated stories with drafted emails.
Not in the way Apollo does. DealStringer is a newsletter, not a CRM extension. The File arrives as email; reps copy the drafted cold email into their sequencer (Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo's own sequencer, Instantly) and log the activity to CRM the same way they log any outbound.
Yes. Apollo for ad-hoc enrichment and ICP search; DealStringer for the daily morning trigger-event brief. The two work well together because they solve different problems.