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How OpenReach works
How OpenReach works: projects, where creator, business and community data comes from, what runs in the background, and what OpenReach will never do.
The parts
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | The web app where you search, save and work through lists and feeds. |
| API | Every feature as REST routes. The dashboard, the MCP server and your own scripts all use it. |
| MCP server | The same features as tools for AI agents, at /mcp on the API. |
| Background worker | Runs lead searches and monitor runs, and starts scheduled monitors. |
| Databases | Accounts, keys and usage in one Postgres database; projects and everything in them in another. |
Tools and projects
Every tool works on its own: search, read the results, export them. A project is a product you are finding customers for. It keeps what is worth keeping:
- saved creators and leads, each with an outreach status, notes and tags,
- lead searches that cover whole cities in the background,
- brand monitors and conversation monitors that check on a schedule and fill a feed.
Where the data comes from
| Data | Source | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube, TikTok and Instagram creators | YepAPI | Paid per call, from your key |
| Businesses on Google Maps | Google’s official Places data, through YepAPI | Paid per page of 20 |
| Reddit, Quora, X, LinkedIn and most communities | Google search results restricted to each site, through YepAPI | Paid per search |
| Hacker News | The official Algolia API | Free |
| GitHub issues and discussions | The official GitHub search API | Free |
| Stack Overflow | The official Stack Exchange API | Free |
| Reddit (self-hosted, optional) | Reddit’s official API, with the install’s own app credentials | Free |
| Lead emails | A business’s own homepage, or a business-email directory, through YepAPI | Paid per lead |
How mentions and conversations are scored
A brand mention is kept only when the page contains one of your brand terms. A conversation gets an intent score from 0 to 100: a question, a request for a recommendation or alternative, frustration with a current tool, a named competitor and recency raise it; age lowers it. Turn on the AI check to have a model drop results that are off topic and explain the rest in a line.
What runs in the background
- Lead searches run their searches a few at a time and save matches as they go. You can cancel them; what they found stays.
- Monitors run daily, weekly or monthly. After the first run, each run reads only pages newer than the last (with a few days of overlap for search indexing). Pages seen before keep their status.
Security
- YepAPI keys are encrypted at rest and never returned by the API.
- OpenReach API keys are stored as hashes and shown once.
- Paid calls are never retried after a server error or a lost connection, since they may already have been billed.
- Spending is capped by your monthly limit and by the ceiling you give each call. See Costs, caching and limits.