Secretary of State business entity data feed
- Coverage
- 50 states + DC
- Cadence
- Weekly status, monthly full
- Typical volume
- ~50k records
- Difficulty
- High
- Price
- $2,300 / mo
What's in it
Business entity records pulled from state Secretary of State portals, scoped to the entity list you provide:
- Entity status - active, dissolved, revoked, withdrawn, merged, with the state's own wording preserved alongside a normalized value
- Formation record - state file number, entity type, formation date, state of formation, dissolution date
- Registered agent - agent name and address, with change history, which is usually the most useful field in the feed
- Officers and principals - names, titles, and addresses where the state publishes them, which about half do
- Filing history - annual reports, amendments, mergers, reinstatements, with filing dates
- UCC records - where the state exposes them through the same portal rather than a separate system
Normalized to one schema across all 50 states, keyed on state plus state file number so an entity is the same row week over week. Status vocabularies are mapped conservatively and the raw state wording is carried alongside, because "inactive" in one state and "inactive" in another are not always the same thing.
Delivery
Weekly delta on status and agent changes, monthly full refresh on the rest. Lands in S3, a webhook, or straight into your database. Typical volume is around 50k records a month at normal client list size; the quote scales with how many entities you track and how often you want them checked.
Why this one is hard
You cannot enumerate. Almost no state lets you walk its entity universe, and trying to is both hostile and a reliable way to get blocked. Every lookup has to be driven by a name or a file number you already hold, which is why this feed is scoped to your list rather than sold as a national database. Anyone offering you all 50 states in bulk either bought it from the states or is not telling you where it came from.
CAPTCHA on the search form is the normal case, not the exception. Roughly half the state portals gate search behind one, and several put the whole session behind an interstitial. The workable approach is a pinned session that survives a batch of lookups rather than solving a challenge per entity, and the difference between those two designs is the difference between a feed that costs $40 a month to run and one that costs $400.
Fifty states means fifty vocabularies. Status values do not reconcile: "revoked" carries administrative meaning in one state and disciplinary meaning in another, and "good standing" is a computed value in some states and a stored field in others. Forcing them into one enum loses the distinction that a compliance or underwriting team actually needs, so the honest answer is to carry both and document the mapping per state.
The same business is five rows. A company registered in Delaware and qualified in four other states appears five times with five file numbers and sometimes five spellings. Resolving that is entity resolution, not scraping, and it is the part that takes the longest to get right.
A handful of states sell a bulk file. Where that exists, buying it is cheaper than crawling and removes the terms question entirely, so it goes in the quote as a disclosed pass-through rather than being crawled around.
Build versus buy
Build it yourself if you need one or two states and your list is small. A single state portal is a weekend, and you will not miss the monitoring at that volume.
The cost curve bends at about ten states, and it bends because of CAPTCHA handling and status mapping rather than because of scraping. Those are both fixed costs you pay once and then maintain forever, and they do not get cheaper as you add states. Put your own engineer-hours against $2,300/mo before deciding, and remember the ongoing half: portals change, status vocabularies change, and a state that quietly stops returning results looks exactly like a state where nothing changed.
Related
This feed sits in two stacks. It anchors the entity side of the Property & Public Record Stack ($5,500/mo) alongside county assessor and recorder data, and it is the largest source in the Compliance Screening Stack ($3,650/mo), where the weekly status delta drives a screening queue.