Free AI Agent With Claude Code: Harvey Finds Clients, Writes Emails and Books Meetings (2026)
Finding clients is the part of freelancing nobody enjoys. You finish a project, open a spreadsheet, and spend hours hunting for businesses, guessing email addresses and writing cold messages you are not even sure anyone reads. Paid AI sales tools promise to automate all of that, but they charge monthly seats and per-token fees that eat a freelancer's margin fast. That is why a free, open-source option matters. In this guide I will show you Harvey, a free AI agent that runs on Claude Code, finds businesses that match your ideal client, reads their websites, writes personalised cold emails and handles the replies, all from your own machine.
No hype and no income promises. Harvey is a working tool with real limits, and this article covers both honestly: what it does, what it actually costs, how to set it up step by step, and who should (and should not) use it.
What Harvey Is
Harvey is a free, open-source autonomous AI sales agent created by ethanplusai and published on GitHub, where it has collected roughly 2,000 stars. It is released under the MIT licence, which means you can download it, use it and even modify it without paying for the software itself. You can find it here: github.com/ethanplusai/harvey.
One important clarification: this Harvey is a small open-source project for sales outreach. It is not the big legal-tech platform with a similar name. If you sell services, video editing, design, development, coaching, anything where your clients are other businesses, this Harvey was built for you.
The idea is simple. You tell Harvey what you sell and who your ideal customer is. It then works in a loop on your own computer: finding matching businesses, researching each one, writing a personalised first email, reading the replies that come back, and continuing the conversation with the goal of booking you a meeting. You stay the decision maker; Harvey does the repetitive legwork.
How Harvey Works: Find, Read, Write, Reply
Most cold outreach fails because it is generic. A template blasted to 500 strangers gets deleted. Harvey's whole design is built around the opposite approach, and its workflow has four clear stages.
Stage 1: Find
Harvey searches for businesses that fit the ideal customer profile you confirmed during setup. The default discovery source is OpenStreetMap data, which is completely free. If you ever outgrow it, the cheapest paid source works out at roughly $0.37 per 1,000 businesses found, which is still close to free compared with the lead databases the big sales platforms charge hundreds for.
Stage 2: Read
For every business it finds, Harvey visits the website and reads it properly. It looks for specific, real details: the services they push, the problems they talk about, the offers on their pages. This step costs nothing in AI calls, because reading a website is plain web requests, not model thinking. It is also the step most human freelancers skip, and it is exactly why their outreach sounds like spam.
Stage 3: Write
Now Harvey writes the cold email, and this is where Claude Code does the thinking. Because Harvey found something specific on each website, the email can mention that detail naturally, the way a thoughtful human would. A personalised email that references a real thing about the business reads completely differently from "Dear Sir, we offer video editing services." That difference is the whole game in cold outreach.
Stage 4: Reply Handling
When a prospect replies, Harvey reads the reply and works the conversation forward, answering questions and steering toward a booked meeting. You are not handed a pile of raw replies to decode at midnight; the agent keeps the thread moving and you step in where human judgment actually matters, the call itself and the close.
What Harvey Actually Costs
"Free AI agent" needs an honest breakdown, because free software can still sit on top of paid pieces. Here is every cost, line by line:
- The agent itself: $0. Harvey is free and open source under the MIT licence. No subscription, no per-seat fee.
- Finding businesses: $0 on the default OpenStreetMap source. The cheapest paid source is about $0.37 per 1,000 businesses if you choose to use it.
- Reading websites: $0. Harvey reads prospect websites with plain web requests, so there is no AI bill for the research stage.
- The AI thinking: Harvey does not charge you per token and needs no API key. It thinks through the Claude Code CLI, using the Claude Pro or Max plan you already pay for, or a ChatGPT plan through Codex. The model cost is your existing subscription, nothing extra per email.
- Sending email: you need a mailbox to send from. The project README recommends a separate sending domain on Google Workspace, at roughly $7 per month. That small cost protects your main domain's reputation, and I will explain why it matters below.
So the honest summary is: the agent is free, but the stack is not entirely free. Your Claude plan and a sending mailbox are real costs. They are also costs most freelancers already have, or genuinely need, which is why Harvey's economics beat tools that bill you again for every single message the agent writes.
How to Set Up Harvey Step by Step
You do not need to be a developer to run Harvey, but you do need to be comfortable following a few terminal steps. Here is the full setup, in order.
Step 1: Check the Requirements
You need three things before anything else: Python 3.11 or newer installed on your machine, the Claude Code CLI installed and logged in with your Claude Pro or Max plan (or a ChatGPT plan through Codex), and an email mailbox to send outreach from. A separate sending domain, for example on Google Workspace, is the recommended setup rather than your main business inbox.
Step 2: Clone the Repository
Download Harvey from GitHub at github.com/ethanplusai/harvey by cloning the repository to your machine. Everything Harvey does happens locally in that project folder.
Step 3: Let Claude Code Set It Up
Open the Harvey folder in Claude Code and simply say: set up Harvey for me. The repository ships with a CLAUDE.md file that turns Claude Code into a setup wizard: it checks what is installed, asks you for what it needs, and walks you through configuration instead of leaving you alone with config files.
Step 4: Train Harvey on Your Product
Next, teach Harvey what you sell using your own website. The command is: harvey train, followed by your website URL. Harvey reads your site and learns your services, so its emails talk about your actual offer instead of generic promises.
Step 5: Confirm Your Prospect Signals
Run: harvey signals --confirm. This step defines what a good prospect looks like for you: the signals of a business that fits your ideal customer profile. Nothing is collected until you confirm, so take a minute here. Better signals in means better clients out.
Step 6: Discover, Watch, and Run
Run: harvey discover, to find businesses that match. Open the dashboard with: harvey dashboard, which runs at http://localhost:5555 in your browser so you can watch prospects, emails and replies in one place. When everything looks right, start the agent with: harvey run. From there Harvey works its loop: find, read, write, reply.
A practical tip from my own client hunting experience: review the first batch of drafted emails personally before you let volume build. The system I use for manual outreach, finding businesses that are already spending on marketing in the Meta Ads Library client hunting guide, works on the same principle as Harvey: personalisation first, volume second. Automation should multiply a message that already works, not rescue one that does not.
Who Harvey Is For
Harvey makes the most sense for people who sell services to businesses and lose hours every week to prospecting:
- Freelancers who find clients through outreach: video editors, designers, copywriters, developers. If your bottleneck is starting conversations, not doing the work, Harvey attacks the right problem.
- Small agencies that need a steady flow of discovery calls but cannot justify an expensive sales platform or a full-time sales development hire.
- Creators selling services alongside their content. If you already make content that proves your skill, a tool like this pairs well with the delivery stack in my Freelancer AI Kit, and with service offers like the product ads in my AI UGC ads guide.
It is a weaker fit if your clients come only from marketplaces, if you sell to consumers rather than businesses, or if you are not willing to spend the small amounts above on a Claude plan and a proper sending mailbox.
The Honest Limits
A trustworthy review has to say what Harvey cannot do, so here it is plainly.
The agent is free; the Claude plan is not. Harvey's thinking runs on your Claude Pro or Max subscription (or ChatGPT plan via Codex), subject to that plan's usage limits. If you do not already pay for one of those plans, that subscription is part of the real cost of this setup.
You stay in control of sending, and you should. Review and approve before outreach goes out, especially while you are learning what the agent writes. An AI writing in your name is a responsibility, not a toy. One careless campaign can damage your domain and your reputation far more than it can help.
Deliverability rules still apply. Cold email lives or dies on sender reputation. Use a separate sending domain so your main domain stays safe, warm the mailbox up gradually instead of blasting on day one, keep volumes sensible, and respect anti-spam law in the countries you are emailing: honest identification, no deceptive subject lines, and a working way for people to opt out. Harvey automates the work; it does not exempt you from the rules.
It books meetings; it does not close deals. Harvey can start conversations and get the right people onto a call. Winning the work still depends on your portfolio, your sample work and how you handle that conversation. Outreach gets you into the room. Your craft closes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Harvey really free?
The software is, yes. Harvey is open source under the MIT licence and costs nothing to download or run. The honest total cost is the stack around it: a Claude Pro or Max plan (or ChatGPT plan via Codex) for the AI thinking, and a sending mailbox, ideally a separate Google Workspace domain at roughly $7 per month. There are no API keys and no per-token bills from Harvey itself.
Do I need coding skills to set Harvey up?
You need basic comfort with a terminal: installing Python 3.11 or newer, cloning a GitHub repository and running a few commands. The clever part is that the repository's CLAUDE.md turns Claude Code into a setup wizard, so once Claude Code is open in the Harvey folder, you mostly answer questions in plain language instead of editing configuration by hand.
Does Harvey send emails without asking me?
You stay in control. Harvey drafts personalised emails and handles replies toward booking meetings, but reviewing and approving before outreach goes out is the responsible way to run it, and the way I recommend. Treat the agent like a fast assistant whose work you sign off, not an autopilot you ignore.
What does Harvey need to run?
Four things: a computer to run on (it works in a loop on your own machine), Python 3.11 or newer, the Claude Code CLI logged in to your Claude plan (or a ChatGPT plan through Codex), and a mailbox to send from. That is the complete list. No Apollo, no ZoomInfo, no extra prospecting subscriptions.
How is this different from paid AI sales tools?
The pricing model. Most autonomous sales agents bill per token or per seat, so an agent that thinks all day costs money all day. Harvey routes its thinking through the subscription CLI you already pay for and uses free or near-free sources for finding businesses, which is why its running cost stays close to the cost of the plans you already have.
Can Harvey get me clients on its own?
It can find prospects, research them, write to them and move replies toward a meeting. It cannot make your offer good, your portfolio convincing or your calls persuasive. Used on top of a real skill and a clear service, it removes the most time-consuming part of client hunting. Used as a substitute for having something worth selling, no tool will save you.
Start Today
If client hunting is eating the hours you should be spending on paid work, Harvey is the most affordable serious attempt at fixing that I have seen: free open-source software, your existing Claude plan doing the thinking, and a workflow built on research and personalisation instead of spam volume. Set it up on one service, confirm your signals carefully, review the first emails like a hawk, and let it run.
And if you are a business owner on the receiving end of all this outreach, here is the part that matters for you: when a freelancer's email lands in your inbox, what wins your reply is proof of work. At Qasim Media, I help brands and creators with professional video editing, thumbnail design and AI-powered content that makes your business the obvious choice in someone's inbox. If your content needs to reach that standard, reach out through the contact options below and let us build it.
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