Alberta Auto Business License Lookup — AMVIC Register

Every business that sells, repairs, recycles or leases vehicles in Alberta must hold an AMVIC licence, and that licence expires on a fixed date. This Actor exports the register: who is licensed, what they are licensed to do, how to contact them, and when their licence comes up for renewal.

That last field is the point. A directory tells you who exists; a renewal date tells you when to call.

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What one row looks like

{
  "registrationNumber": "B1041046",
  "name": "1010 TIRES.COM INC.",
  "tradeName": null,
  "licenceStatus": "Issued",
  "isActive": true,
  "entityType": "Corporation",
  "businessClasses": ["Service Station", "Mobile"],
  "street1": "37 Cottonwood Cresent",
  "city": "Calgary",
  "province": "AB",
  "postalCode": "T8L 0H8",
  "telephone": "780-885-9179",
  "email": "cldd2019@gmail.com",
  "website": null,
  "expiryDate": "2026-09-30",
  "daysUntilExpiry": 18
}

field	what it is
registrationNumber	AMVIC's own licence number
licenceStatus · isActive	Issued means currently licensed
businessClasses	What they are licensed to do — Used Sales, Retail Sales, Wholesale, Auto Body, Garage, Service Station, Recycling and Dismantling, Leasing, Mobile, Specialty Service
entityType	The legal entity (Corporation, Sole Proprietorship…). Not a licence class — that's businessClasses
expiryDate · daysUntilExpiry	The renewal date, and how long is left
email · telephone · address	Contact details as filed with AMVIC
province · provinceRaw	Normalised code, plus exactly what the register said

Measured size — the honest numbers

The register holds 21,974 rows, but that figure oversells it. Measured 2026-09-11 on the full register:

Currently licensed (Issued)	8,297
— of those, with an e-mail	8,291 (99.9%)
— of those, with a renewal date	8,297 (100%)
Expired, closed or cancelled	9,973
Applications and refusals (no licence number, no status)	3,667 — excluded by default

Expiring soon, among active licences: 401 within 30 days · 1,052 within 60 · 1,665 within 90 · 3,741 within 180.

A note on fill rates, because the register lies about them. AMVIC writes the literal string "N/A" into empty columns. Counted naively, email looks 99.8% filled. Treating "N/A" as empty — which this Actor does, before anything is counted, filtered or charged — the true rates across all 21,974 rows are: e-mail 82.6%, expiry 80.8%, registration number 83.3%, trade name 56.1%, entity type 52.6%, website 20.1%. An "N/A" in an e-mail column is how a scraper poisons a CRM.

Input

input	default	what it does
licenceStatus	["Issued"]	Currently-licensed only by default
province	["AB"]	Normalised, so Alberta, ALBERTA and AB all match
city	—	Case-insensitive. Calgary 2,179 · Edmonton 1,837 · Red Deer 206
expiringWithinDays	0	The renewal trigger — e.g. 60 returns the 1,052 licences due inside two months
requireEmail	false	—
includeUnlicensed	false	See below
includeBusinessClasses	true	Adds licence classes. One extra request per delivered row, never billed separately
maxRecords	1000	Cap on delivered and charged rows
proxyConfiguration	Apify RESIDENTIAL, CA	See Why residential

Results come back soonest-expiry first. That matters when you cap a run: you get the most urgent licences, not whichever ones happened to sit at a low offset in the register.

Applications and refusals are excluded by default

3,667 register rows (16.7%) have no licence number and no status. They are applications and refusals, not licensed businesses — and 230 of them put an individual's name and an adverse outcome in the name field ("SABRIE, ABDEL-AZIZ (refused)", "1776042 ALBERTA LTD. (Refusal)"). They are not business leads and they are filtered out unless you deliberately ask for them with includeUnlicensed.

Why residential

AMVIC's register sits behind AWS WAF, which matches on User-Agent and on IP reputation. Measured 2026-09-11, same request, same correct desktop Chrome header:

exit	passed
Residential, Canada	10 / 10
Home connection	10 / 10
Datacenter	4 / 10

A rejected request returns HTTP 405 with x-amzn-waf-action: captcha. That status is misleading: it does not mean "method not allowed" and it does not mean "slow down" — it means the client fingerprint was refused. This Actor pins a full desktop Chrome header, retries a bounded number of times on a fresh session, and then fails the run with that explanation rather than looping forever or delivering a half-register.

It also checks its own work: the register is only accepted if the number of records read matches the count AMVIC itself declares. A short read fails the run instead of quietly shipping a smaller register.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.0018 per business-record — charged only for a row delivered to your dataset. Licence classes are included in that price; the extra lookup that fetches them is never billed separately. Filters are applied before delivery, so rows they drop are never charged, and a run that returns nothing costs nothing.

A default run (1,000 rows) is $1.80; all 8,297 active licences is $14.93.

Small runs are relatively dearer to produce. The whole register has to be read before it can be filtered, so a 25-row run costs about the same to run as a 1,000-row one. That is our cost, not your price — but it is why this Actor defaults to 1,000 rows rather than 25.

Every run writes a RUN_SUMMARY with the register size against AMVIC's declared count, how many rows were applications rather than licences, what the filters matched, delivered vs charged, and what truncated the run.

Source and legal

Data comes from AMVIC's public register at amvic.ca.thentiacloud.net, the register Albertans are directed to in order to check whether a business is licensed. AMVIC publishes it under the Consumer Protection Act and the Automotive Business Regulation.

robots.txt on that host reads, verbatim:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Many of the e-mail addresses are personal (gmail, shaw, telus) because a large share of Alberta's licensed automotive businesses are owner-operators. They are published by the regulator, but they are still personal data: Canadian anti-spam law (CASL) requires consent or a genuine business relationship for commercial electronic messages, with real penalties. You are responsible for your own compliance. This Actor deliberately does not return AMVIC's salespeople register, which is a list of named individuals rather than businesses.