One page per question, each one answered in the first two sentences. Where the honest answer is “do it by hand, here is how”, that comes first, before ZipLead is mentioned. Every page also says what ZipLead does not cover, because a page that only flatters the product is not worth reading.
The free way is Google Maps: search a category and a city, then work down the list and note every business whose profile has no Website button. It takes about an hour per hundred businesses, and the catch is that a profile with no website link is not the same as a business with no website, because plenty of them put a Facebook page or a booking link in that field instead.
Read the answerThe reliable free sources are government filings, not maps: your state's new business entity registrations, your city or county business license list, and county fictitious business name filings, all of which are public and most of which publish weekly. Maps data cannot give you this, because Google only shows an opening date for places that have not opened yet, and a low review count is a weak proxy that also catches ten-year-old businesses nobody reviews.
Read the answerOpen each restaurant's Google profile and its website and look for an Order Online button, a delivery link, or a menu that ends in a phone number instead of a cart. That takes about a minute per restaurant, and it is more reliable than any automated check, because ordering can live on a third-party app the restaurant's own site never mentions.
Read the answerSearch Indeed, Google Jobs or Craigslist by ZIP code and filter to the last week, then note the employer rather than the role. That is free and current, and the same signal shows up on the business's own site as a Careers or We Are Hiring page, which is the version you can check at scale.
Read the answerSearch your category plus the ZIP code on Google Maps, then copy name, phone, rating and review count into a spreadsheet for every result. Budget about an hour per hundred businesses, and know that Google stops at roughly 120 results for one search area, so a dense ZIP code needs several narrower searches to cover properly.
Read the answerEvery state licensing board publishes its license file, and most of them publish it free with an expiration date on every record, so the list you want is a download and a sort rather than a purchase. California's contractor board and Texas's trade boards both publish usable files; some states only offer a one-record-at-a-time lookup form, in which case there is no list to build.
Read the answerGoogle Maps carries a phone number for most local businesses and it is free to read one at a time, which is the answer for anything under a few hundred businesses. The catch nobody mentions is that the number on a profile is frequently a call tracking line or an answering service, so for a business you actually want to reach, the number on their own contact page or in their site footer is usually the better one.
Read the answerThree free sources, in the order worth trying: the business's own about or team page, the state business entity filing which names the registered agent and often the officers, and the state licensing board record which for many trades names the owner directly. None of them is complete, and for a lot of small businesses the answer is simply not written down anywhere public.
Read the answerLook on their own website first, because most local businesses publish an address on the contact page, in the footer, or on an about page, and that one is real. If there is nothing published, the next honest step is a likely address built from a name on a public record, clearly treated as likely, because a guessed address that bounces damages the reputation that gets your other email delivered.
Read the answerOpen the site on your phone, not your laptop, and check three objective things: whether it is readable without pinching, whether the address bar shows a security warning, and whether anything on it is dated more than two years ago. Those are facts you can say out loud on a call, unlike "it looks old", which is taste and gets argued with.
Read the answerUse the free transparency libraries: Meta publishes an Ad Library covering every active Facebook and Instagram ad, and Google publishes an Ads Transparency Center, and both let you search by advertiser. The faster check at scale is looking for advertising tracking code on the business's own website, which tells you they have set up advertising, though not whether a campaign is running today.
Read the answerLook at the business's own website, because most booking, payment and scheduling systems leave visible traces there: a Book Now button that points at the vendor's domain, a checkout that loads the vendor's code, or a powered-by line in the footer. That is free to check one at a time and it is the only method that is genuinely reliable, since a company's customer list is not public.
Read the answerThe comparison pages name what each other tool does better than ZipLead, including the ones where the answer is to buy theirs.
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