A transparent prospecting workspace built around open data.

What LeadForge actually is

LeadForge asks a public geographic database — OpenStreetMap — which businesses of a chosen type are mapped within a chosen radius of a chosen place. It then presents those listings as a filterable list and an interactive map, lets you shortlist the ones that look relevant, and exports the shortlist as CSV or GeoJSON.

Everything it shows comes from data that is already public. There is no proprietary enrichment layer, no purchased contact file, and no scoring model that claims to know whether a business wants to buy anything. The only score in the product is a completeness score, and it measures exactly one thing: how many fields the public listing happens to contain.

Why it exists

Most local-business prospecting tools sit behind an account, a subscription, and a database whose provenance you cannot inspect. The same starting information — who is where, and what they do — is available in open data that anyone can query directly. LeadForge is a thin, honest interface over that open data: it shows where each record came from, tells you when a field is missing rather than guessing at it, and hands you the raw export instead of locking the list inside a platform.

The trade-off is deliberate. You get transparency, portability and no vendor lock-in. You do not get guaranteed coverage, verified contact details, or any assurance that a business is in the market for what you sell. Those limits are stated throughout the product because they are real.

The map-first workflow

A LeadForge session follows one path. You pick a country and city, adjust the search centre on the map if the city centroid is not where you want to look, set a radius between 1 and 50 kilometres, and choose up to three business types — from the built-in categories or as a free-text term such as bus station. The search then queries public map data around that point.

Results arrive as individual businesses, each carrying whatever the public record holds: name, category, address, coordinates, distance from your search centre, and sometimes a phone number, website, e-mail address or opening hours. You can review them as a list, as a map, or side by side, filter and sort them, and select the ones worth keeping. The full walkthrough is in How LeadForge works.

Where the data comes from

OpenStreetMap

Business listings are read from OpenStreetMap through bounded Overpass queries built around the coordinates you chose. Category selections map to real OpenStreetMap tags — a dentist search looks for amenity=dentist, a pharmacy search for amenity=pharmacy — so the results are ordinary map features, contributed and maintained by volunteers.

GeoNames

City and region suggestions come from a city index built from GeoNames data and shipped with the application. Typing a city name queries that local index rather than sending every keystroke to a live geocoding service, and the coordinates it returns are what anchor the map search.

OpenFreeMap

The map is rendered by MapLibre GL JS using the OpenFreeMap Liberty style. Map tiles are requested by your browser directly from the tile host as you pan and zoom. Operators who deploy their own copy of LeadForge can point it at a different compatible map style.

Public business websites

Contact discovery is separate, optional and explicit. When you ask for it on specific listings, the server fetches that business website — its public homepage, and at most one same-site contact or about page — and reads publicly visible e-mail addresses, telephone links and social profile links. It refuses private network destinations, follows only a small number of redirects, caps response size, and does not attempt to bypass logins or other access controls.

What stays in your browser

LeadForge has no accounts and no central customer database. The lists you build live in IndexedDB inside the browser you built them in:

• Saved leads — the businesses you explicitly save, up to 200 records.
• Recent searches — your last five searches, stored with their results so you can look back at them.

Nothing in that store is synchronised to a server, and clearing it is a single action, available at the bottom of this page. Because the store is per-browser, a saved list does not follow you to another device — export it if you need it elsewhere. The full picture, including what each request sends where, is in the privacy policy.

Getting the data out

Anything you can see, you can export. LeadForge writes CSV files for the full filtered list, for just the records you selected, for the subset that has phone numbers, and for the subset that has e-mail addresses — plus GeoJSON when you want the results as geographic features rather than rows. It also imports CSV, so a list you exported earlier, or built somewhere else, can be brought back in and viewed on the map. See Exporting business data for the column layout and the cleaning steps worth doing first.

Limitations worth knowing before you rely on it

• Coverage varies. OpenStreetMap is contributed by volunteers. A dense city centre may be mapped thoroughly while an outer suburb is barely mapped at all, and an absent business is not evidence that it does not exist.
• Fields are frequently missing. Many listings have no phone number, website or opening hours. LeadForge shows the gap rather than filling it with a guess.
• Records can be out of date. A business may have moved, closed or been renamed since the listing was last edited.
• A map listing is not a business registry. Nothing in the data confirms trading status, ownership, or that a contact address is the right one to write to.
• No intent signal exists. LeadForge cannot tell you that a business is looking to buy. It tells you that a business of a given type is mapped at a given place.

The practical consequence is simple: verify each record before you act on it. Every result screen in the product says so, and it is not a formality.

How we think about responsible use

Public data being accessible does not make every use of it appropriate. LeadForge is built for looking up businesses you have a genuine reason to contact — not for indiscriminate bulk messaging. The product reflects that: contact discovery is opt-in and capped rather than automatic, searches are geographically bounded rather than unlimited, and exports contain the records you selected rather than everything the map holds.

Marketing, privacy and anti-spam rules differ by jurisdiction and they are your responsibility to follow. Responsible business outreach sets out the practices we expect of anyone using this tool, and the terms of use state what is not acceptable.

Open source

LeadForge is released under the MIT License and the entire source — search logic, category mappings, contact-discovery safeguards and all — is public. You can read exactly how a query is built, run your own copy against your own Overpass endpoint, or fork it. Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub; see the contact page for how to report a bug, ask for a feature, or disclose a security problem privately.