Six weeks ago "verify a contractor licence in Canada" meant opening a different clunky government portal for every province. I wanted one search box. So I built one — a live site backed by 65,177 official contractor and home-builder licences, plus an API for the same data. This is the build log: the stack, the data pipeline, and the one bug that quietly cost me 98% of my Ontario records.
The problem
Canada has no single national registry of licensed contractors. Quebec has the RBQ. Ontario licenses new-home builders through the HCRA. Every province publishes its own data in its own format, on its own portal, with its own quirks. For a homeowner trying to check "is this person actually licensed before I pay them a deposit," that's a dead end. For a developer who wants the data programmatically, it's worse.
The goal: aggregate the official registries into one place, keep it free to search, and expose the same data as a clean API for people who want to build on top of it.
The stack
