# Changelog of BBB Scraper 🏢 US Leads by Rating, Complaints & Owners (`tagadanar/bbb-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/tagadanar/bbb-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/tagadanar/bbb-scraper.md

## Changelog

### 2026-08-09 (b) — filters run on the listing, and a 996× price cut

- **Rating and accreditation filters no longer download a profile to discard
  it.** BBB's search results already state each business's rating and
  accreditation, so `minRating` and `accreditedOnly` are now applied to the
  listing and non-matching businesses are never fetched. On the search in our
  own test fixture, `accreditedOnly: true` used to download 15 profiles and
  return 0 rows; it now downloads none. `minRating: "A"` used to download 15 to
  return 7; it now downloads 7. Each listing field has to agree with five real
  profiles before it is trusted, and one disagreement switches it off for the
  rest of the run, so the filters cannot silently start dropping businesses if
  BBB changes its search payload.
- **`hasComplaints` cannot be answered from the listing** — BBB's search results
  carry no complaint count — so it still opens each profile. A run whose filters
  match almost nothing now stops early and explains why in its status message
  instead of working through thousands of businesses that will be discarded.
- **Profiles are fetched five at a time** instead of one after another. A large
  request used to hit the one-hour run timeout at roughly a thousand businesses;
  `maxResults` was capped at 50,000, a number the Actor could not reach. The
  ceiling is now an honest 5,000 and the default is 20 instead of 100.
- Dropped a browser fingerprint from the retry ladder that could not connect at
  all, so every fetch was silently wasting its first attempt.
- **Pricing: business profile $2.49 → $0.0025 each ($2.50 per 1,000).** The
  Actor stays user-pays and the $0.001 start fee is unchanged. **Not yet
  applied** — staged in `actors/tools/cfg-bbb-scraper.json`.

### 2026-08-09

- Store copy: the page now leads with the job — filtering US businesses by BBB
  rating, accreditation and complaints on file — and spells out "Better Business
  Bureau" in the first line. Added two evidence tables to the first screen: how
  the filter options compare with the eight busiest BBB Actors on the Store
  (only this one can return *businesses with complaints on file*), and the public
  30-day failed/timed-out run rates with their sample sizes shown.
- Removed the "undercuts the complete-record scrapers … for close to their price"
  claim from the Pricing section: a Store-wide price survey on 2026-08-09 showed
  it is not true.
- Title and description updated. **Not yet pushed** — staged for review together
  with the pricing proposal in `actors/tools/cfg-bbb-scraper.json`.

  *Superseded by the 2026-08-09 (b) entry above:* the price landed at
  $0.0025/profile, not $0.015, and the Actor stays **user-pays** — so the
  "platform usage is included" wording must NOT ship. The README Pricing section
  has been updated to $0.0025 with the platform-usage sentence kept.

### 2026-07-13

- README: pricing section now discloses that platform usage (compute + US residential proxy) is billed separately to your run.

### 2026-07-12

- Invalid input no longer fails the run. The run now finishes cleanly with a clear explanation in its status message, so a typo or an empty list is easy to spot and fix.
- List inputs now accept datasets piped straight from another scraper: entries
  that are objects are read through their usual key names (url/link,
  query/keyword/title, name/company and similar) instead of being rejected.

### 2026-07-11

- Billing: on paid runs every row is billed before it is written, and a run
  now stops visibly if billing fails instead of continuing unbilled.

### 0.1.0

First release. Search Better Business Bureau by business type and city, or scrape profiles directly by URL. Returns the full BBB record per business: A+ to F rating, accreditation status and date, review and complaint counts, owner or principal contact, phone, website and full address, plus category and company details. Filter by minimum rating, BBB Accreditation, and whether a business has complaints on file.