Business License Verification and Lead Finder

Apify Store title: Business License Verification and Lead Finder

Apify Store description:

Verify any business license and find brand-new licensees as B2B leads, straight from public city Socrata data (default: City of Chicago). Get clean rows: legal and DBA name, license type, status, full address, ward and precinct, issue and expiry date, business activity, and a deep verification link. Ideal for compliance and vendor-verification teams, B2B sales prospecting new businesses, and franchise scouts. Zero-config default run returns the newest active licenses immediately. Points at any Socrata licensing portal. 100% public data: no login, no PII.

Source + legality

GET https://data.cityofchicago.org/resource/r5kz-chrr.json?$where=...&$order=...&$limit=... - the City of Chicago Business Licenses dataset on the public Socrata SODA API. Statutorily public municipal data. No authentication is required for modest use; an optional Socrata app token raises rate limits. No consumer PII. Set datasetUrl to any other Socrata licensing dataset to run it against a different city or portal.

Zero-config default run

Empty input returns the most-recent ACTIVE Chicago business licenses (license_status = AAI, sorted by date_issued newest-first) so the Store "try it" button works on first click.

Inputs

datasetUrl, searchTerm, statusField, activeStatus, orderField, maxResults, appToken - all optional. Use searchTerm to verify a named business (free-text search across the record) or to find leads by keyword.

Output fields

legalName, doingBusinessAs, licenseType, licenseCode, status, statusLabel, businessActivity, address, city, state, zip, ward, precinct, wardPrecinct, neighborhood, dateIssued, expirationDate, licenseNumber, latitude, longitude, source

The source field is a stable per-row deep link built on Socrata's universal :id, so it works on whatever portal the actor is pointed at.

Run locally (no Apify account)

npm install
npm test --workspace actors/business-licenses-monitor
# or run the actor directly:
node actors/business-licenses-monitor/src/main.js

Proposed pricing (set in Apify at publish - CJ-gated)

Pay-Per-Event in the documented winning band:

• ~$0.004 per license row returned

Pricing is NOT set here; it is configured on the Apify Store at publish, CJ-gated. No account, no publish, no spend happens in this repo.