Building a daily filings email off county recorder data: the concentration risk that almost ended it

$180 a seat for something that saves a subscriber an hour a day is underpriced, and that's usually obvious to the person setting the price. The real question is whether to raise on existing seats or only new ones. Grandfathering existing seats feels generous in the moment and tends to become a long-running annoyance, since those accounts end up costing the same to serve as everyone else while paying years-old rates.

Did you have anyone paying before you wrote the scraper, or did you build first? I'm sitting on a half built thing and trying to figure out whether I'm about to waste four months.

Eleven days cost a quarter of the subscriber base. What is the plan if a county goes down for six weeks, or moves permanently behind a paid API? That looks like the failure mode that ends the whole thing, and four counties is not much spread.

I subscribe to two products in this shape and cancelled a third. The third one failed on dedup, same filing arriving as new because the county reposted it with a different case format. Once you don't trust the email you stop opening it. How are you keying records for dedup, on the document number or something you build yourself?

The unit economics here look fine and the risk sits somewhere else. $3,960 MRR against $310 direct is a 92% gross margin, which is normal for a scraper business and misleading, because your real cost is the six hours a week of parser maintenance. Price that at any reasonable rate for your own time and margin lands closer to 60%, and it gets worse as you add counties, since maintenance load scales with the number of distinct portals rather than with revenue.

That's the thing that decides whether this expands. Every new county adds a parser that breaks independently. Four counties at six hours a week suggests roughly ninety minutes per county per week, so twelve counties is your entire working time before you've sold a single additional seat. Platforms in this space usually solve it by standardizing ingestion so a new county is configuration instead of code, or by paying for a vendor feed where one exists. Both cost money up front and both are the difference between a job and an asset.

The 25% churn from an 11 day outage is the number to design around. @luis_carrera is asking the right question. A cached last-known-good state, a manual fallback you can actually sustain, and telling subscribers on day one that the feed is down all reduce the damage. Subscribers forgive an outage they were told about far more than one they discover.

On defensibility, the scraper isn't it, since anyone can point one at a public index. Your filter rules from 60 days of manual review, the dedup keys, and the subscriber list are harder to copy.

What this depends on: whether your counties keep publishing at current access levels. That's a policy decision you don't control, and it differs by state and office, so read the terms again when they change.

$400 a month is a reasonable price for this if the phone numbers were verified instead of passed through raw. Half of what comes back from skip trace is disconnected and the caller eats the time. That's a product on top of the product already built here.

Does the filter catch anything on land? Tax delinquency on vacant parcels is what I'd want, and in my county that's posted by the treasurer rather than the recorder, so I'd guess it's a different scraper entirely.

A useful clarification for anyone watching daily filings is which document types actually matter. Watching filings only pays off once it's clear what a given filing signals about whether an owner is likely to sell, since most recorded documents don't carry that signal at all.

What did you build it in? Asking as someone who has never written a scraper and is wondering how far out of reach this is.

Those five cancellations over missing phone numbers point at a real tradeoff. A calling operation built to close that gap can run $61 or more per answered call, against a model that just ships data and lets the buyer call. The second is clearly the cheaper end of the business to run. What was churn like in months five through twelve once the phone number complaint went away? Worth knowing whether a data feed holds subscribers long term or whether people cancel once they've mined the county.

22 seats across four counties, how much overlap is there? If six subscribers are all working the same county, they're calling the same owner within an hour of each other, and eventually the best one figures out he'd rather have exclusivity than a shared list. Worth thinking about capping seats per county, or is that giving up revenue that would rather be kept?

Six hours a week fixing parsers is the number that would stop most people. That's not passive at all, and it's the kind of work that has to happen whether anyone feels like it or not, because a broken morning email is visible to every subscriber the same day.

How often does the owner name match to assessor records go wrong? Common names, trusts, LLCs. Seems like the sort of thing that's 95% right and the 5% is what makes someone cancel.

Running the numbers: $3,960 minus $310 is $3,650 a month, call it $43,800 a year, against six hours a week of labor which is roughly 300 hours. That's $146 an hour before counting the sales and support not mentioned. Solid hourly rate, not obviously a scalable asset yet. And the 22 seats look more fragile than the outage story suggests. One county is what fraction of the value? If it's the biggest one and it goes away, does a subscriber in that county have any reason to keep paying? Worth writing that concentration down.

Two of the counties I care about post nothing usable online and you go to a terminal in the building. I've paid a courier to check weekly. Did you look at whether a person on the ground can feed the same pipeline, or did you just cut those counties?

Worth reading the actual terms of use for a county recorder before acting on a claim like this. Bulk downloading is often addressed in one sentence and commercial redistribution in another, and neither is usually clear enough to act on without asking someone. Anyone building this should read the actual county page rather than assume public means unrestricted, and understand it differs by state and by office. @dmitri_248, did your attorney give you a written opinion or a conversation? The paper is worth having before selling access.

The 60 days of checking every record by hand is what I keep coming back to. Everything good in the post seems to come from that and it's the least technical thing you did.