You have a business to launch, a non-profit to fund or a service to sell, and nothing to spend on a contact list. You search for how to generate leads for free, and you land on fifteen listicles that all end in the same place: publish content, be patient, go to events. Not one of them tells you how many companies you can actually reach without paying, or how many of them have an address you can write to.
This page answers those two questions with dated numbers instead of advice. It also gives you the legal rule that applies the moment you write to a company that has never heard of you, because that rule decides whether your approach stands up or not.
Behind the word "leads" sits a much plainer question
The word comes from sales teams: an identified contact you could follow up with. From here on this page says contact, or company, because that is what it is when you are starting out alone.
So the real question is not how to generate leads for free, but this: which sources of addresses are genuinely open, with no paid account, and how far do they go? France has two, and they do not give you the same thing. The first is a state register. The second is a map. Neither hands you a ready-made list, and that is exactly what the listicles never say.
The public company register is free, and it is huge
France keeps a register of every company and every place it operates from: the Sirene register, run by the national statistics institute INSEE. It is published free of charge as open data and updated daily (INSEE, page updated 17 October 2024), and the full dataset downloads from data.gouv.fr without signing up.
As of 5 September 2026 the register holds 14,310,906 active, publicly listed establishments (outsend measurement on the Sirene open data stock). If you would rather not download anything, the Annuaire des Entreprises, the state-run lookup service, queries the same data straight from a browser, by name, address or activity.
What you get: legal name, postal address, activity code, headcount band, incorporation date, legal form. Enough to define very precisely who you are aiming at, by trade and by area, before you try to reach anyone. Our page on the French company database landscape sets out how these registers fit together.
What you do not get, and this is the part everyone skips: no email address, no phone number. The register tells you who exists and where. It never tells you how to reach them. The gap between the two is the whole job.
What the map adds, measured rather than promised
The second open source is online mapping. It shows what the register ignores: the phone number on the shopfront, the website, the opening hours. The honest question is what share of listings carry that information, and above all what share ends in an address you can write to.
We measured it instead of estimating it. Test area: Paris and 50 kilometres around it, a single trade, photographer. Google Maps extraction run on 28 August 2026, then an address lookup across the resulting websites on 29 August 2026. Here is the full chain, step by step.
| Step | Listings | Share of the starting set |
|---|---|---|
| Listings found on the map | 8,177 | 100% |
| Listings carrying a phone number | 6,849 | 83.8% |
| Listings carrying a website | 6,920 | 84.6% |
| Websites examined for an address | 6,877 | 84.1% |
| Websites yielding at least one email address | 3,415 | 41.8% |
Read the last row both ways. Against the websites actually examined, an address turns up one time in two: 49.7% (outsend measurement, 29 August 2026). Against the starting point, 41.8% of listings survive, four in ten. The rest have no website, or a website that shows only a contact form.
This is the figure the listicles cannot carry, because it contradicts their promise: free works, but it loses six listings in ten along the way. So you have to cast wide at the start if you want a usable number at the end. Building a list of 500 targeted companies begins with a far larger sweep than 500.
Writing to those companies: the rule that actually applies
French law is more permissive here than most people assume, and far stricter on form. When you write to someone in a professional capacity, the data protection authority does not require prior consent: the approach rests on legitimate interest, provided that the subject of the message relates to the recipient's occupation (CNIL, page updated 10 June 2026). The same page notes that an organisation's generic addresses, the contact@ or info@ kind, concern legal persons and are not subject to those principles.
In exchange, three duties attach to every message: say who you are, give a working address where someone can ask you to stop, and honour that request at no cost. The last one is written into Article L. 34-5 of the French postal and electronic communications code, which forbids sending a marketing message without contact details allowing the recipient to stop it.
One recent development deserves a clear statement, because it is being reported badly. On 25 June 2026 the French Constitutional Council struck down the sixth, eighth and penultimate paragraphs of that same Article L. 34-5, on the ground that three separate authorities could punish identical facts, and it deferred the repeal to 31 October 2027 (decision no. 2026-1210 QPC). What fell was the stacking of proceedings, not your duty to let people refuse. The rule of conduct is unchanged.
If your target is a private individual rather than a company, everything changes: prior consent is required. Our page on a first email and GDPR covers both regimes.
The free path, in order
Nothing below needs a subscription. All of it needs time.
- Define your target in the Annuaire des Entreprises: one activity, one area. You now know how many organisations genuinely exist, before any illusion of volume.
- Go back to the map for trades that have a shopfront: the map, not the register, carries the website.
- Drop the listings with no website. On the measurement above, that removes 1,257 of 8,177 at this step, and that is normal.
- Open each website, go to the legal notice or contact page, take the address down. One time in two it is there.
- Check the address exists before you write: a list full of dead addresses damages your sender reputation for a long time.
- Write one message per company, with your identity and a line that lets the reader say no.
- Keep your own refusal list, and respect it. That is what separates you from a bulk blast.
Steps 2 to 5 are exactly what outsend automates: pulling an area's listings into a CSV export, finding the addresses behind the websites you obtained, then checking those addresses exist. The product is in alpha and access goes through an application for a free trial. Nothing stops you doing the same steps by hand: the result is identical, the time is not.
What free costs anyway
It costs no money. It costs hours, in direct proportion to the number of listings you agree to open. That is the only variable you really control. Nobody can promise you a number of replies, and a page that promises one is selling you something.
The second cost is less visible: quality. An address taken by hand from a contact page is almost always an organisation's generic address. It arrives, it gets read, but it is addressed to nobody in particular. So the message has to carry itself from the first line, saying why it concerns this company and not the other 8,176. If you have no registered business behind you, our guide to reaching out without a registered company sets out what you may and may not do.
For the definitions of the terms met along the way, browse the full prospecting glossary.
Frequently asked questions
How do you get contacts for free when starting from nothing?
By starting from the public register rather than a commercial directory. The Annuaire des Entreprises tells you for free who exists, where, and in what activity, across the 14,310,906 active establishments recorded on 5 September 2026. Online mapping fills in the website and the phone number. Everything after that is manual work, not a purchase.
Is there a website to find clients for free?
There is a website to find companies for free, which is not the same thing. annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr is operated by the French state, opens with no account and no payment, and rests on INSEE data. It carries no contact details at all: it tells you who to aim at, never how to reach them, and nobody becomes a client of a postal address.
Can you really find clients for free?
Yes, if you accept the real yield. In our test area on 28 August 2026, 3,415 of 8,177 starting listings ended in an email address, which is 41.8%. Free does not block the approach, it prices it in hours. Anyone promising a shortcut is almost always selling something else.
Am I allowed to email a company that never asked me to?
Yes, if the subject of your message relates to that person's occupation, if you identify yourself clearly and if you offer a simple way to refuse further messages (CNIL, 10 June 2026). Writing to a private individual, on the other hand, requires prior consent. And the duty to give a working address for refusals still sits in Article L. 34-5 of the postal and electronic communications code.
Do I need a registered company to use these sources?
No. The Sirene register data is public and reusable by anyone, student, non-profit or person with no registered business. What your status changes is what you are allowed to offer at the end of the message, not your right to consult an open register.
Why do so many listings yield no email address?
Three causes stack up. The first is measured on its own: the listing has no website at all, which is the case for 1,257 of 8,177 listings. The other two our measurement does not separate: the website exists but shows only a form, or the address is hidden inside an image to deter robots. Of the 6,877 websites examined on 29 August 2026, 3,462 stayed silent for one or the other.
How many companies should I start with?
Take the number of contacts you want at the end and multiply it by 2.4, since 41.8% of listings make it through. For a hundred usable addresses you therefore start from two hundred and forty listings, which on one trade and one area is quickly delimited inside the public register.