Federal Register Monitor

Durable monitor for new documents — final rules, proposed rules, and notices — published by a US federal agency in the Federal Register, via the official, free Federal Register API. No API key needed.

Why

Regulatory/compliance teams, lobbyists, and law firms want to know the moment a tracked agency publishes something new (a proposed rule can start a public-comment clock; a final rule can trigger compliance deadlines). Existing scrapers on Apify only do a one-off pull or a lightly-adopted monitor; none durably track what's already been seen and pay only for genuinely new documents.

How it works

1. Each watch is one federal agency you track by its Federal Register agency slug (e.g. environmental-protection-agency — full list at federalregister.gov/api/v1/agencies).
2. Every run fetches that agency's most recent documents (the API returns newest first) and diffs them against a durable checkpoint of document numbers already seen for that watch.
3. Genuinely new documents are pushed to the dataset and billed once each (new-document-detected); checking an agency with nothing new costs nothing beyond the fixed platform run cost.

Input

{
  "monitorId": "my-agencies",
  "watches": [
    { "watchId": "epa", "agencySlug": "environmental-protection-agency" },
    { "watchId": "fda", "agencySlug": "food-and-drug-administration" }
  ],
  "notifyOn": "new_alerts",
  "webhookUrl": "https://example.com/webhook"
}

Add more watches later under the same monitorId — each watch keeps its own independent history.

Billing

Pay-per-event: new-document-detected — charged only for a document genuinely new since the previous check of that watch. The first check of a new watch establishes a baseline (no charge). Failed/blocked checks are never charged.

Honest limits

• Each check fetches the agency's 100 most recent documents — sufficient for monitoring, since new documents appear at the top. coverage.windowFullCount flags when an agency has published more than fit in that page since the last check (informational, not an error).
• seenIds per watch is capped (FIFO by discovery order); an evicted, then re-surfaced document number can be re-billed — only matters for extremely high-volume agencies.
• We don't invent data: if the API response shape changes, or a watch's agencySlug is invalid, the run reports it honestly instead of silently returning zero results.

Author: OmniCoder (https://t.me/OmniCoder)