New business licenses from three US cities.
Price
3 USD
per 1 000 records. Platform usage is included.
Try it free: Apify's free plan includes 5 USD of usage every month, enough for about 1 650 records. No credit card needed.
What it does.
The three portals are read live through the Socrata SODA API. Seattle and San Francisco update daily, and Los Angeles states a monthly update interval. Filter by city, start date range, license type or industry words, NAICS code prefixes, text in the business name and active businesses only. Results come newest first across the selected cities.
Private persons are left out by default: in Seattle by the city's own ownership type, and in San Francisco and Los Angeles by a rule on the name and the address. Phone numbers, mailing addresses, e-mail and owner fields are never requested. A run with empty input returns the 50 newest active records from the last 30 days, and the sample below is such a run on 11 October 2026.
Sample from a real run.
JDydicnVqaGOWGtsp on 11 October 2026, exactly as the tool returned them.city | businessName | dbaName | businessActivity | naicsCode | zip | issuedAt | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | LUKAS TECHNOLOGIES LLC | null | Hobby, Toy, and Game Retailers | 459120 | 98122 | 2026-10-11 | Active |
| Seattle | GLOBAL MARKETING LLC | null | Convenience Retailers | 445131 | 98104 | 2026-10-11 | Active |
| Seattle | WILDFLOWER HAIR STUDIO | WILDFLOWER HAIR STUDIO | Beauty Salons | 812112 | 98105 | 2026-10-11 | Active |
| Seattle | LITTLE MOUSE ARTS | LITTLE MOUSE ARTS | Jewelry Retailers | 458310 | 98121 | 2026-10-10 | Active |
| Seattle | MILA MASSAGE LLC | MILA MASSAGE LLC | Other Personal Care Services | 812199 | 98107 | 2026-10-10 | Active |
What people use it for.
Sales teams and agencies
New restaurants, salons, offices or contractors in a city every morning, withonlyNewset to true.Suppliers and service companies
POS, payroll, insurance, signage, cleaning and food suppliers looking for businesses that just opened.Market research
Count new businesses per NAICS code and ZIP to see which industries and neighbourhoods grow.
Fields.
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
city | The city whose portal the row comes from |
state | Two letter state code |
licenseNumber | Seattle: city account number. San Francisco: business account (certificate) number, shared by all locations of one business. Los Angeles: location account number. |
businessName | Registered or legal business name as the city publishes it. For sole proprietors this is the owner's name, which is why they are left out by default. |
dbaName | Trade name or doing business as name. null when the city has none, or when the trade name looks like a private person and excludeIndividuals is true |
entityType | Seattle only: ownership type such as Corporation, LLC - Single Member or Sole proprietorship. |
licenseType | Seattle: Business License Tax Certificate. San Francisco: the city's license code description where one exists (most rows have none). Los Angeles: Office of Finance business registration. |
businessActivity | Industry in words (NAICS description) for Seattle and Los Angeles. San Francisco publishes only the code. |
naicsCode | NAICS industry code as reported by the business. Los Angeles uses 2007 NAICS codes. |
addressLine | Street address and locality of the business location |
zip | Five digit ZIP |
latitude | Latitude where the city publishes it, otherwise null |
longitude | Longitude where the city publishes it, otherwise null |
issuedAt | Start date, YYYY-MM-DD: license start date in Seattle, location start date in San Francisco and Los Angeles. |
expiresAt | End date of the location or DBA when the city has recorded one (only with activeOnly: false), otherwise null. |
status | Active or Closed. |
isLikelyIndividual | true when the record looks like a private person: in Seattle an ownership type of Sole proprietorship, General Partnership, Trust or Other, in San Francisco and Los Angeles a person's name or a home address. With excludeIndividuals set to true (the default) every delivered row has false |
sourceUrl | SODA API link that returns exactly this record from the portal. |
sourceDataset | The dataset the row comes from |
license | License of the dataset |
Input example.
{
"cities": [],
"onlyNew": false,
"issuedTo": "",
"activeOnly": true,
"issuedFrom": "",
"maxResults": 50,
"licenseTypes": [],
"excludeIndividuals": true
}What a run costs
A run with the default input returns at most 50 records, so it costs at most 0.15 USD. The run on 11 October 2026 shown above returned 50 records in about 3 seconds, which is 0.15 USD. maxResults caps every run, and platform usage is included in the price.
Run it on a schedule.
Ask for new rows only
SetonlyNewtotrue. The actor remembers what it has already delivered for the same input, in a named key-value store in your own Apify account (nightwave-state-us-business-licenses).Add a schedule
Add the actor to a schedule in Apify Console, for example with the cron expression0 7 * * *for 07:00 every day.Get what is new
The first run returns everything in the selection. After that, each run returns and charges only what is new. A run with nothing new finishes with 0 rows and costs nothing.
Source and license.
All data comes from the Socrata Open Data API of each city's portal: data.seattle.gov, data.sf.gov and data.lacity.org. No API key is needed. Chicago and New York City are not included: Chicago's dataset has the city's terms of use instead of a public domain license, and New York's states no license. The tool is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the cities.
The license of each dataset was read from the portal's own metadata on 7 October 2026 and is repeated in the license field of every row: Public Domain for Seattle, the Open Data Commons PDDL for San Francisco and CC0 1.0 for Los Angeles. These allow copying, changing and commercial reuse without permission. The cities provide the data as is, without warranty of its accuracy.