149: 10 Niche Databases You Should Use

And most of them are free or dirt cheap

Author

Jed Mahrle
June 21, 2026

Welcome back to the Practical Prospecting newsletter!

This week I'm sharing 10 niche databases and tools I use, or am starting to test, for list building.

P.S. If you want to see what kind of outbound campaigns we can run for you, book a call here.

Shovels

If you sell to SMB construction, this one's great. You can filter and see what permits a company has active and pending. That tells you who's actually busy right now, so you can infer who probably needs help and personalize around that instead of guessing.

They also have an API, which makes this way easier to plug into a workflow instead of manually pulling lists.

Link: Shovels.ai

MoltSets

This is a new product from Adam Robinson, Founder of RB2B. There’s no UI at all, it's an API built for Claude Code that gives you “Unlimited” contact data.

I say “Unlimited” because it’s still in beta and there are API rate limits. So anything can change. But so far, it’s promising. I’m planning to run it for the next couple weeks and see how it holds up (keep an eye out for some videos on LinkedIn about it).

It's a good example of where these tools are heading: API-first.

USA Spending

This one shows you who's getting government funding. You can use this as an intent signal to prioritize your list or for personalization by referencing the specific grant or contract in your outreach. There's a lot of creative ways to use this one once you start digging in.

FMCSA

FMCSA stands The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. If you sell to companies with fleets, this is one of the best databases out there. You can find every company with a registered fleet and filter by inspection history, fleet type, fleet size, etc.

I downloaded the whole data base (over 4 million records), and it already includes emails and owner names.

Click here to download the database.

FAA Registry

Same idea as FMCSA but for aviation. If you sell into aviation, flight schools, or charter operators, the FAA keeps a public registry of aircraft and airmen, including owner info.

Click here to download the database

State Contractor License Lookups

There's no single national database for this one, every state runs its own contractor licensing board, and they don't share a format. California's CSLB is the standout though. They have a public data portal where you can pull licensed contractors by classification and county, completely free.

Other states vary, some have decent public APIs, some you're stuck scraping. Worth checking if you sell into the construction and trades world.

This one shows recent inspections and violations by company. If you sell anything safety or compliance related, this is an awesome signal. A company that just got flagged is a company that might be in the market for a fix.

Click here for the lookup page.

ScrapeLI

This one's great for custom LinkedIn scrapes. I use it most for scraping company followers and turning that into an ICP filter list. If you've ever wanted a clean way to find people who already follow a competitor or a brand in your space, this is my favorite tool.

Emtoss

This site has a list of 452 niche databases you can download for free, or literally only pay a dollar to get all the emails too. This is a good place to grab quick lists for niche ICPs that are hard to scrape from the typical platforms.

To give you an idea of the types of niche databases they have, there’s literally a list of 40k+ leads for “Attic Ladder Installation”.

BlitzAPI

Can't really call this one a niche database at this point, it's pretty well known. But I wanted to include it because, similar to MoltSets, it's one of many data platforms going API-first.

There's a bigger trend here. People are starting to build their entire lists from inside Claude, using APIs like Blitz instead of clicking around a UI. I like Blitz because it's a reliable way to scrape contacts and companies straight from LinkedIn.

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I'm testing a ton of these tools inside of Claude Code workflows for list building right now. Keep an eye out for future newsletters, I'll go deeper on the workflows and share the actual skills so you can use them too.

Thanks for reading,

Jed