🏪 City Business License Monitor — New-Opening Leads

A new city business license = a business opening or expanding. This actor pulls newly-licensed (and soon-to-open) businesses from public city open-data registries — name, license type, address, neighborhood, and date — and runs on a schedule to alert you to NEW ones. A hyperlocal lead feed for merchant services, payments, insurance, commercial real estate, suppliers, and local-services sales.

No login, no anti-bot — every source is a public city Socrata feed.

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Why it's a signal

A business that just got licensed is actively standing up operations — buying POS/payments, insurance, signage, furniture, a lease, suppliers, and software. Catching it at licensing (often before it opens) is the earliest commercial-intent moment, in a precise location and category.

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Cities & sources (validated)

City	Source	Date signal
Chicago	data.cityofchicago.org Business Licenses	date_issued (true new-issuance, ISSUE only)
Seattle	data.seattle.gov Business Licenses	license_start_date
San Francisco	data.sfgov.org Registered Business Locations	location_start_date (open only)

More cities are on the roadmap — per-city adapters mean coverage grows without breaking your runs.

The window is lookbackDays back + futureDays ahead, so you catch both just-licensed and opening-soon businesses (Seattle/SF often carry a future start date).

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Output (one record per license)

source · business_name · legal_name · license_type · naics · address · city · state · zip · area (neighborhood/ward) · start_date · date_type (issued / business_start) · status · lat · lng · record_id · source_url · is_new · scraped_at

Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS — or pull via the Apify API into your CRM, Clay, or n8n.

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How to use it

1. Click Try for free.
2. Pick your cities and a lookback window.
3. (Optional) filter by license type (e.g. Restaurant) or a keyword.
4. Click Start, then open the Dataset tab.
5. For a live feed: turn on Monitor mode, add a Schedule (e.g. daily), and a Slack/email/webhook.

Quick start — new restaurants

{ "cities": ["chicago", "seattle", "sf"], "licenseTypeFilter": "Food", "lookbackDays": 60 }

Daily monitor

{ "cities": ["chicago"], "monitorMode": true, "alertOnNewBusiness": true, "slackWebhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/…" }

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Pricing (pay-per-event)

Event	What it covers	Suggested price
lot-scraped	each business returned	~$3–4 / 1,000
monitor-run-completed	each scheduled watch run	~$0.05 / run
new-lot-detected	each newly-appearing license	~$0.02 / business
alert-delivered	each Slack/email/webhook alert	~$0.005 / alert

(Final prices are set on the actor's pricing page.)

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Notes

• Public city records (business-level) — no consumer personal data. Review each city's open-data terms; your use is your call.
• SF dataset is SF tax registrations; a few records have an out-of-city HQ address — filter by city if you need strictly in-city.
• No double-counting — monitor mode remembers seen licenses (per city + filter scope) and emits each once.