Franchise FDD & Filing Change Monitor

Stop reopening the same franchise filing portals, FDD libraries, and franchisor opportunity pages just to check whether anything changed. Give the Actor the public pages you already track and receive structured before/after evidence when an FDD/PDF link, filing status, fee, date, territory, contact, or application call to action changes.

Built for franchise counsel, compliance teams, due-diligence analysts, brokers, and competitive-intelligence teams. The Actor keeps persistent snapshots in Apify Key-Value Store, so a scheduled watchlist produces auditable dataset rows without an external database.

Every target reports whether a baseline was created, the page stayed unchanged, meaningful content changed, policy blocked the request, or fetching failed.

Why use this Actor?

• Track known state registry, franchisor disclosure, and franchise opportunity pages.
• Detect new or changed FDD/PDF links, filing language, dates, fees, territories, contacts, and calls to action.
• Replace manual page checking with structured JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or API output from Apify Dataset.
• Keep deterministic hashes, diffs, and persistent history without an external database.
• Pay only for successfully checked pages. Failed or policy-blocked fetches are not charged.

This is a known-URL watchlist and change-intelligence tool—not a crawler of every state registry, not an FDD legal-review service, and not legal advice.

Quick start

{
  "targets": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.franchisedirect.com/",
      "label": "Franchise Direct",
      "pageRole": "franchise"
    }
  ],
  "runMode": "compare_with_previous",
  "snapshotNamespace": "competitor-watch",
  "maxPages": 20,
  "requestDelayMs": 1000,
  "respectRobotsTxt": true
}

The first successful check creates a baseline. Later runs compare the current normalized page text with the previous snapshot.

For continuous monitoring, create an Apify Schedule for the same input. Keep snapshotStoreName and snapshotNamespace unchanged across scheduled runs.

Input

targets

An array of 1–50 public HTTP(S) pages. Each target supports:

• url — required public URL.
• label — optional human-readable label.
• pageRole — one of pricing, courses, camps, open_days, franchise, locations, contact, recruitment, or generic_offer.

Private, loopback, link-local, reserved, credential-bearing, and non-HTTP URLs are rejected before fetching.

Persistence

• runMode: compare_with_previous or baseline_only.
• snapshotStoreName: named Apify Key-Value Store used for normalized snapshots.
• snapshotNamespace: separates independent campaigns inside the store.

Network and noise controls

• maxPages: maximum targets processed, up to 50.
• maxBytesPerPage: response-size limit, up to 2 MB.
• timeoutSecs: timeout for each page.
• requestDelayMs: delay between requests.
• respectRobotsTxt: skip pages disallowed by robots.txt.
• noisePatterns: regular expressions for routine text to remove before comparison.
• blockedUrlPatterns: additional URL patterns to skip.

Output

Each target produces one dataset row. Important fields:

• status: baseline_created, unchanged, changed, blocked_by_policy, or fetch_failed.
• addedText and removedText: compact line-level diff, capped to keep output manageable.
• detectedEvents: categorized changes with severity, confidence, evidence, and old/new values.
• offerSignals: PDF document links, prices/fees, dates, locations, contacts, and calls to action currently visible.
• contentHashPrevious and contentHashCurrent: SHA-256 hashes for deterministic comparison.
• snapshotKeyCurrent: persistent Apify KVS reference.
• error: explicit failure reason when a page could not be checked.

Example event:

{
  "category": "price",
  "severity": "high",
  "confidence": 0.91,
  "summary": "Price-like value or pricing wording changed or appeared.",
  "evidence": ["Tuition fee: £125"],
  "oldValue": "£100",
  "newValue": "£125"
}

Pricing

$0.01 per successfully checked page. There is no charge event for fetch_failed or blocked_by_policy results. The Actor uses a lightweight HTTP-first runtime; no proxy or browser cost is added by default.

Limitations

• Public, server-rendered HTML pages only.
• PDF links found on monitored HTML pages are preserved and compared. The current version does not parse the contents of PDF files.
• No JavaScript rendering, login, CAPTCHA solving, or private-page access.
• Dynamic widgets rendered only in the browser may not appear in extracted text.
• Detection is deterministic pattern matching, not an AI interpretation.
• Website structures and access policies can change. Review failed rows and respect each site's terms and applicable law.

Privacy and responsible use

Use the Actor only for pages you are permitted to access and monitor. It intentionally rejects local/private network destinations and URLs containing credentials. Snapshots and datasets are stored in the Apify account running the Actor and follow that account's retention and access settings.

The output is monitoring data, not legal, regulatory, or investment advice. Verify filing status and disclosure documents with the responsible authority before relying on them.

Support

When reporting a problem, include the run ID, target domain, row status, and sanitized error message. Never include passwords, session cookies, or private URLs.