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My skip trace vendor pulled my API access and called what I built a competing product

Found out on a Tuesday, 4,200 enriched records sitting in Postgres, no way to refresh any of them. I had been running the enrichment as the core of the platform, billing two clients $800 a month each, and the whole thing stopped being viable inside of 48 hours. A guy I know who has been in data for fifteen years told me afterward that this happens to almost everyone who builds on top of a skip trace feed, and that the vendors tolerate it until they don't. I wish someone had said that to me nine months ago when I was writing the first query. The $1,600 in MRR felt real. The dependency was the actual product and I just didn't see it.

1annika_sorenannika_sorenCP2APRO17
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1 reply

That vendor clause about "competitive use" is buried in every TOS I've ever read and nobody flags it until you're already profitable enough to matter to them.

The 4,200 records you already have are still yours depending on your data agreement, worth having a lawyer look at whether you can run those through a second vendor without it being a breach. Some of the property data aggregators like ATTOM or First American have API terms that are less aggressive about the competing product language, at least as of the last time I checked.

The $1,600 MRR is real though, two clients is a real thing to rebuild around if you can swap the data layer fast enough.

0shane_doughertyshane_doughertySU1B
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