Almost every tool in this category is a database or a sender
They are sold with the same words and they do different halves of the job. Knowing which half you are looking at is most of the evaluation, and it is the thing the category page of any vendor — including this one — is least likely to tell you. So: the split, eight questions worth asking, and where this product genuinely is not the answer.
The split nobody names
| DatabasesContact data, filters, exports | Give you a list |
|---|---|
| SendersSequences, inbox, templates, analytics | Send to a list |
The gap between them is a CSV, and that CSV is where lists go stale and replies get lost.
Neither half is dishonest about what it does; the category name just covers both. The practical consequence is that a team buys one, discovers it needs the other, and ends up maintaining a manual join between two systems that do not know about each other.
Eight questions
- Can I search my own market before paying, and do the businesses I already know appear?
- Where does the contact data come from, in one sentence I can repeat to a lawyer?
- Does the tool send, or only export?
- When someone replies, where does the reply go, and can two people share it?
- What does one lead cost, end to end — found, qualified, and messaged?
- What happens on the free plan, and does it need a card?
- If I leave, what do I keep?
- What does the tool refuse to do? A vendor with no answer has not thought about it.
The last two are the ones that predict how the relationship goes.
The India-specific ones
Does WhatsApp cost extra, and to whom?
For Indian B2B, WhatsApp is the channel that gets answered, and most tools sit between you and Meta with a per-message markup. Ask whether you connect your own WhatsApp Business account and who Meta bills.
Does it understand send hours?
TRAI restricts commercial communication hours, and a tool that sends whenever the queue drains is a compliance problem wearing a feature name.
Is the data actually Indian?
A global database with thin India coverage will happily return a small number of results for an Indian city and let you assume that is the market.
How Rechlio answers them
- Both halves. Discovery, scoring, sending and the inbox are one product, so there is no CSV in the middle. The full path.
- Data is from business listings — what businesses publish about themselves. No purchased contact database, no guessed personal emails.
- Four channels from one campaign: WhatsApp, email, SMS and AI voice.
- Replies arrive in a shared inbox with a status, an owner, labels and private notes.
- ₹0.20 to find a business, ₹2.00 to score it, ₹0 platform fee to message it on WhatsApp — you connect your own account and Meta bills you directly.
- A free plan with no card. Pricing in full.
- You keep your WhatsApp number, your Meta account and its quality rating, because they were never ours.
- It refuses things: the AI cannot launch a campaign or send a billed message without a person approving it, and free-form WhatsApp outside the 24-hour window is rejected rather than attempted.
When this is the wrong tool
- You need named decision-makers and verified work email addresses. That is a contact-database purchase, and this is not one.
- You sell to enterprises through a long committee process. The scoring here reads business listings, which say nothing about a procurement cycle.
- You need a CRM of record with forecasting, territories and custom objects.
- Your market is outside India. The channel mix, the send-hour rules and the data coverage are all built around Indian businesses.
- You want an AI that runs outbound unattended. It cannot, by design.
Questions
- Do I need a database tool and a sending tool?
- Many teams end up with both, and the cost is not the second subscription — it is the CSV between them. Every export is a snapshot that starts ageing, and the reply that lands in the sender never makes it back to the database.
- How do I evaluate data quality without buying first?
- Search for your own market and see whether the businesses you already know appear. If a tool will not let you search before you pay, that is itself an answer. Rechlio’s business lead finder runs without an account for this reason.
- Is per-action pricing better than a seat licence?
- It is better when your volume is uneven, which for most small sales teams it is — a month with no campaigns should not cost the same as a month with four. It is worse if you want a predictable line in a budget, which is what the monthly plans are for.