US Importers Finder: ImportYeti Alternative for US Customs Data

New US buyers of your product, ranked for your country, in your inbox every week.

⚡ First 25 US importers free · 💵 ≈ $0.036 per qualified US importer all in, the source scan on your account included — $0.005 of it is ours · 🤖 ≈ $0.041 all in with AI, on plans with model access or your key · ⏱️ demo in seconds

Try it in 30 seconds. Click Try it — the form is pre-filled with a free demo on ten sample importers of five niches; type your product and press Start for the live search. Your first 25 qualified US importers are free, and importers that fail your filters cost nothing here (the scan runs on your account). Which plan: the demo and your own rows (list mode) run on any Apify plan · the live search and the weekly digest run on a plan that runs Store Actors (Apify Starter and up). → What a run costs · Run it weekly

⚡ At a glance

🎯 What this Actor does

• Importers ranked for your product and country — HS / product match, volume, recency, growth: one 0–100 score with its reason.
• Who already buys from your country — expand there, or switch-pitch where it buys only elsewhere.
• The tariff-year angle — who buys half or more from China, who is exposed to the UFLPA.
• The whole outreach, never an invented price — a pitch angle; with AI on, the first e-mail, a LinkedIn note and the day-5 follow-up.
• Who to write to — the contact add-on finds the checked address of the hot importers.
• Never stuck on one broken scraper — three ImportYeti Actors, one schema; forwarders and repeats cost nothing.

🔎 Find US importers of your product by keyword or HS code

Type "cotton t-shirts" or HS 6109 and pick Your country; HS codes alone run memo23's HS-code pages. No product? Describe the buyer in Who is your ideal buyer? — the terms are read from it.

🚢 US importers by port and lane — for forwarders, NVOCCs and customs brokers

US entry ports ("savannah") and Min containers (TEU) keep the importers landing on your lane, carriers on the row.

🌏 Tariff 2026: who is leaving China

Target flags → china_plus_one keeps the importers buying half or more from China; four presets pitch India, Vietnam, Mexico or Bangladesh as the second source.

✉️ Find the e-mail to write to — the contact add-on

Find the e-mail to write to sends the best hot / warm importers (10 a run) to our Company Contact Finder: its checked address and the named person fill contactEmail / contactName, ≈ $0.0075 per e-mail found, billed by that Actor on your account.

🚀 How to use it

1. Click Try it — the free demo on ten sample importers of five niches runs as is.
2. Type your product and pick Your country — it replaces the sample and runs the live search on your Apify account, capped by "Max source spend". Leave "AI assessment" on (which AI your plan gets).
3. Press Start — hot importers first; the Outreach view says how to reach each one.
4. Schedule it weekly with your address in "E-mail me the new US importers" — only new importers are charged. Already scraped ImportYeti? Paste that dataset ID into Dataset — no second scrape.

📚 Learn more: Step-by-step tutorial: find US importers of your product

🆚 Why this instead of the raw ImportYeti scraper?

vs other scrapers, Store neighbours and subscription tools

memo23/importyeti-scraper ($0.0008 a row + $0.02 a run), scrapesage/importyeti-scraper ($0.009 a profile), muhammadafzal/importyeti-scraper ($0.005 a row), scrapemint/customs-ruling-finder (CBP rulings) and ImportGenius / Panjiva / Volza seats, with users and 100 usable importers all in: rivals side by side.

💵 Pricing — what a run really costs

Pay per result: one event per qualified US importer, nothing else.

One free tier: your first 25 qualified US importers are free, whatever the tier. Never charged by us: importers below "Minimum score", too old, too small, off your ports or TEU floor, forwarders, your exclude list, repeats. No fee of ours — the source's $0.005 start fee per product term and $0.00699 per profile run on your account, capped by "Max source spend".

How that compares — $0.005 is at the $0.005 median of the 10 Actors a Store search for "us importers finder" shows (parity), but per qualified US importer: one replaces ≈ 4 scanned profiles, $0.0013 per raw-row equivalent.

Worked example — "cotton t-shirts" from India, form defaults: 30 profiles scanned → ≈ 7 qualified US importers (estimate): source 30 × $0.00699 + $0.005 = $0.21, plus 7 × $0.005 = $0.25 rules only (≈ $0.036 each), or 7 × $0.01 + 7 × $0.0004 tokens = $0.29 AI on (≈ $0.041 each). AI tier, all in: ≈ $0.010 per importer here ($0.01 + $0.0004 tokens: ≈ 2,150 in / 510 out per importer measured 2026-10-24 with an own gemini-3.5-flash-lite key, priced at the default gemini-2.5-flash-lite rates). At volume — 5 products weekly, 120 profiles → ≈ 28 importers: $1.00 rules only · $1.16 AI on, a week. Every figure: cost table.

🤖 What the AI tier adds

The same importer, AI off (the free demo, 2026-10-24):

{"name": "Harbor & Pine Apparel Co", "ruleScore": 93, "label": "hot", "companyType": "brand", "originSharePct": 59.4, "pitchAngle": "You already source 59.4 % of your supplier shipments from India, with 64 shipments in the last 12 months …", "emailDraft": "", "linkedinNote": ""}

The AI quotes the bills of lading, types what a keyword rule cannot ("Bluefin Promotional Products": distributor) and writes the whole outreach — ≈ 8 minutes each on 10 sample US importers (by hand vs the AI rows, 2026-10-24). Without model access the demo shows these verdicts labelled aiModel: "sample"; a free Gemini key (aistudio.google.com/apikey) assesses 1–3 importers per run, a paid key all.

⚙️ Input

The rest (first source, unitValueUsdPerKg, exclude list, model, sendAlertsTo) is in the Input tab. Flags for "Target flags" (an unknown name stops the run): hs_match / keyword_match, buys_from_origin / only_rival_origins, china_plus_one / uflpa_exposed, growing (up 20 %+), active_recently / high_volume, has_contact / forwarder (an ambiguous name — kept, not dropped).

📤 Output

One dataset item per qualified US importer — JSON, CSV, Excel or a webhook. Views: Shortlist, Outreach, Suppliers, lanes & volumes, Score breakdown, Export. Sort by score; ruleScore is the rule part, fitScore the AI's — trend across runs on ruleScore; assessedBy says which scale each row is on, OUTPUT.mode what the run was (demo · live · list · dataset).

⭐ Found it useful? A review on the Store helps others find it.

🔁 Run it weekly

1. Open the saved task and click Schedule after your first real run (its status links it, OUTPUT.scheduleTaskUrl), with your address in notifyEmail: each run with new importers mails the digest.
2. Leave dedupeAcrossRuns: true — the next run charges only new importers; adding a product keeps the memory.
3. Send alerts to posts the digest to Slack / Teams / Discord / Telegram; Google Sheets gets the rows — start from the tracker sheet. historyDatasetName keeps a dated log.

Weekly cost is new importers only: week 1 ≈ 7 per product, $0.29 AI on; from week 2 only the few new to the records (week-2 figure due 2026-11-06). The importer-change feed (watchChanges) ships 2026-11-13.

🎯 Try it for your niche

Pick one in Start from a ready US-importer search and press Start (your own values win); each first run is capped at 20 profiles / $0.15 until its yield is measured (counts due 2026-11-06).

🔌 Integrations, automation and API

Run outcomes — what your integration sees

Webhook: webhookUrl POSTs

{"event": "us_importer.qualified", "us_importer": {…}, "runId": "…"}

MCP: {"mcpServers": {"apify": {"url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=rich_minds/us-importer-finder-ai"}}} — ask "Run us-importer-finder-ai with {} first (free), then search cotton t-shirts for an Indian exporter." Minimal agent input: {"sourceMode": "live", "products": ["cotton t-shirts"], "originCountry": "IN", "maxQualified": 20, "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5, "dedupeAcrossRuns": false} — memory off, so a repeat question gets the top importers again; any plan: {"sourceMode": "list", "itemsList": [{"name": "…", "url": "…"}]}.

List-mode rows — what a pasted record needs

Any plan, no source run; rows of the three ImportYeti Actors work as they are.

👥 Who is it for?

🧠 How the AI works

• Grounded: the reason must quote the goods text; a pitch, e-mail, note or follow-up naming a price or a number the row lacks is replaced or dropped.
• Company type — brand / retailer / distributor / manufacturer / forwarder; an AI forwarder is dropped free.
• Model: google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite through Apify's model access, else your own key; the best rule-scored importers first; if the model fails, importers keep their rule score at the basic price.

🔒 US customs records: data, compliance and limits

Public US customs records — the ocean bills of lading US Customs publishes, indexed by ImportYeti; no login, no private data. No prices in bills of lading (estValueUsd12m is your benchmark × weight); ocean freight only. Use the output within ImportYeti's terms and the law (GDPR, CAN-SPAM).

❓ FAQ

What will my first run cost me? Only the scan, ≈ $0.21 on your account (capped at $0.50): your first 25 qualified importers are free; after that $0.005 per qualified importer, $0.01 + $0.0004 tokens with AI.

Is this an ImportYeti scraper or an ImportYeti alternative? It runs zen-studio/importyeti-scraper on your account and ranks the profiles for your product and country; for one company the free ImportYeti website shows more (every shipment); for every US buyer of your HS code, ranked weekly, this saves ≈ 13 h per 100.

Is this an ImportGenius alternative? For "who in the US buys my product, and how do I pitch them" — yes, ≈ $4.05 per 100 ranked importers with AI instead of ImportGenius USA Essentials at $229 a month (list price, 2026-10; Panjiva and Volza quote); they win when you need every shipment of every importer in one UI.

How fresh is the data? lastArrival / firstArrival are the arrival dates published in the bills of lading (when the ship arrived); scrapedAt is when this run downloaded the row. New bills of lading are indexed within weeks.

How long does a run take? The free demo under a second, a live search of 30 profiles ≈ 2–4 min (estimate), AI with your own key measured 1–8 s per US importer (a free gemini-3.5-flash-lite key).

Do rule-scored importers use my free ones? Yes — your first 25 are free whatever the tier, 5 of them kept for your first AI-assessed importers while the AI is unavailable.

What if nothing matches? Will I be charged twice? 0 rows cost nothing here. With dedupeAcrossRuns on, adding a product keeps the memory; another originCountry or port list delivers a charged importer as already-charged.

Is this legal, and how do I send the openers? Yes — public US customs records; the outreach is yours under CAN-SPAM / GDPR: by hand from your company address, a few a day, no links in the first e-mail or the LinkedIn note, opt-outs honoured.

🧩 More Actors from the same developer

• Company Contact Finder — Got the importers? It turns each importer's name and website into the checked e-mail to write to — feed it the Shortlist, or switch on the contact add-on here.

🆘 Support

Something missing or wrong? Open an issue on the Actor's page — requests from buyers are shipped first.

📝 Changelog

• 0.1.3 (2026-10-24) — the contact add-on; the AI writes a LinkedIn note and the day-5 follow-up; China-plus-one presets for Vietnam, Mexico and Bangladesh; one set of all-in prices; a JavaScript snippet.
• 0.1.2 (2026-10-24) — the first e-mail at the AI tier; port, lane and TEU filters; China-plus-one and UFLPA flags; HS codes on memo23; a five-niche demo.
• 0.1.1 (2026-10-23) — first release: ranked US importers from ImportYeti customs records, origin share, pitch angle.

Coming next: the measured funnel (2026-10-30) · the importer-change feed (2026-11-13) · a corridor list (2026-11-20).