A cheaper, developer-friendly building-permit and contractor-data API undercutting Shovels' $599/month entry price.
“Market-tested” means a real shipped product or experiment measured the failure directly (a live user count, a dead auction, a documented shutdown). “Predicted” means the verdict is an evidence-based forecast from the receipts below, not a direct measurement.
Real price complaints about Shovels' sales-gated ~$599/mo entry tier, and repeated Upwork postings paying for one-off permit scrapes — people pay for this data today, at both the API and gig level.
The wedge is already flooded, twice over. At least five independent 'X vs Shovels' comparison microsites exist (PermitStack, PermitVector, TradeBridge, HomeLogs, Permit Ledger) — each one is a competitor squatting the exact 'cheaper than Shovels' search intent you would need. On the Apify marketplace, 13+ permit-scraper actors all sat under 90 users when measured. That pattern — many entrants, no traction leader — is a market that has voted no at the self-serve price point, while the buyers who genuinely pay (lead-gen platforms, insurers) buy normalized 1,800-jurisdiction coverage, which is exactly the per-jurisdiction maintenance treadmill that makes this a labor business, not a passive API.
If the current comparison-site and actor cohort visibly cleared out leaving measured unmet demand at a specific sub-$599 price point, the wedge reopens — but the per-jurisdiction normalization labor would still need an honest automation answer.
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