Developer Builds Free Canada-Wide Contractor Licence Lookup Site Using Open Government Data

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A developer has built a free contractor licence verification website and API aggregating 65,177 official records from Canadian provincial registries, including Quebec's RBQ and Ontario's HCRA, which previously required separate portal searches. The project uses Apify scrapers to collect and normalize data from each province, stored in a Cloudflare D1 SQLite database and served via an Astro 5 site running entirely on free-tier infrastructure. A critical bug silently reduced Ontario's builder records from tens of thousands to just 755 for two days, caused by an alphabet-only search sweep that missed numbered corporations and a detail-enrichment step that overran API usage limits mid-run. The fix involved expanding the search sweep to include digits 0–9 alongside letters and making the detail-enrichment step optional, fully restoring the Ontario dataset. The platform offers both a public search interface and a JSON/CSV API, aimed at homeowners and developers who need programmatic access to contractor licensing data.

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