A developer-friendly federal court records and docket-alert API undercutting UniCourt and PACER's per-page fees.
“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.
Chronic, documented complaints about PACER's $0.10/page fees and UniCourt's enterprise pricing — from journalists, researchers, and legal-tech developers, recurring for years.
The cheap tier is occupied by a mission-driven nonprofit that will never be undercut: Free Law Project's CourtListener offers a free REST API, free docket alerts, and the RECAP archive — millions of federal documents crowd-liberated from PACER, growing daily by design. Competing below it means competing with free, permanent, and beloved. Above it, UniCourt and LexisNexis-class vendors own the paid tier with normalized state-court coverage — which is a per-county-scraper maintenance treadmill (hundreds of court systems, each breaking independently). The middle you would occupy does not exist: hobbyists and journalists use CourtListener; businesses pay for normalized state coverage you cannot passively maintain.
CourtListener's free coverage degrading materially (contrary to its trajectory and funding model) or a PACER pricing change stranding a new buyer tier. Neither is in evidence; the nonprofit floor is the most durable kind.
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