Harvey: A Free AI Sales Agent That Runs on Your Claude Code Plan

Most "AI sales agents" are a monthly invoice with a chatbot attached. Harvey is the opposite pitch. It's an open-source sales agent that runs on your own laptop and uses the Claude Pro or Max plan you already pay for, through Claude Code. No API key, no per-token bill, no $400 a month for a prospecting database.

What Harvey actually does

You point it at your own website with harvey train https://your-site.com and it learns what you sell. Then it goes looking for businesses that might want it. The default source is OpenStreetMap, which costs nothing and needs no account. For each business it reads the homepage, the robots.txt and the sitemap. That's three HTTP requests and zero model calls, and it's where the useful facts come from: which agency built their site (most of them sign the footer), whether they're running Google or Meta ads, whether the blog died in 2023, whether you can book online or have to phone in.

Those facts end up in the first line of the email. That's the whole idea. A cold email that says "noticed you're running Google Ads but there's no way to book after 6pm" gets read. One that says "I hope this finds you well" gets deleted, and Harvey's writing rules literally ban that phrase, along with "circling back" and "just wanted to reach out."

After that it runs on a loop, every 15 minutes by default. Wake up, check the budget, pick the most useful job (replies first, then sending, then writing, then finding new leads), do it, log it, go back to sleep. It also respects quiet hours, so it isn't firing off mail at 3am.

The part I like most: you approve everything

Harvey can collect 23 different signals about a business, but it won't touch any of them until you confirm them. Each one tells you what it costs before you turn it on. Then you build a target list like a filter: has an agency, running Google Ads, doesn't have online booking. The dashboard at localhost:5555 counts the matches as you click.

Every email sits in an outbox until you approve it, one at a time if you want. Email addresses get tagged as verified, risky, guess or invalid, and it only sends to the deliverable ones. If you never want it to send anything, harvey export gives you a CSV you can load into whatever sequencer you already use. Honestly that alone is worth the install for a lot of people.

Who it's for

Agencies, freelancers and small SaaS teams selling to local businesses with 5 to 50 staff. That's exactly the segment where tools like Apollo and ZoomInfo have thin coverage, and where a specific, observed detail beats a generic template. If you sell enterprise software to Fortune 500 buyers, this isn't built for you.

You'll want to be a little technical. Setup is Python 3.11+, a .env file and a sending mailbox, ideally on a separate domain so your main one doesn't take a reputation hit. The easiest path is to clone the repo, open Claude Code inside it and say "set up Harvey for me." The repo ships a CLAUDE.md that turns Claude into the setup wizard. If you've never written one, our CLAUDE.md guide explains why that trick works so well.

The sales brain is just Markdown

Harvey's know-how lives in a skills/ folder of plain Markdown files: email frameworks (AIDA, PAS and a few others), objection handling, lead qualification, offer strategy. They get pasted into the prompt before each run. So if the emails feel too pushy, you open email_frameworks.md and change it, and the next cycle behaves differently. No retraining, no restart. It's the same pattern behind every good Claude Code skill: put the expertise in a file the agent reads.

Things to know before you run it

It uses your subscription's quota, so it will eat into the Claude usage you'd otherwise spend coding. Harvey reads your quota and throttles itself (there's a setting to cap it at, say, 80% of your daily limit), which is thoughtful, but keep an eye on it the first week. Check your provider's terms too. And cold email has real legal rules depending on where you and your prospects are; the repo has a section on this and you should read it.

If Claude isn't your thing, it also works with a ChatGPT plan through Codex on macOS and Linux. It's MIT licensed and very actively maintained, with over 1,200 GitHub stars at the time of writing.

If you want more of this kind of thing, read how marketers use Claude Code day to day, or see our walkthrough on building your own agents with Claude.

Get Harvey on GitHub

Harvey is free and open source. The code, install steps and docs all live in the repository: ethanplusai/harvey.

View Harvey on GitHub →

Listed by AgentsKit. We don't maintain this project and aren't affiliated with its author. Read the code before you run anything that touches your machine or your inbox.

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