Writing and maintaining a scraper for every Secretary of State site, county recorder, and city portal is where most public-records projects die. Amalgament is that whole pipeline, already built and maintained, behind one API and one MCP server.
Scraping one government portal is a weekend. Scraping dozens, keeping them alive through redesigns, normalizing every format, and resolving records across them into one entity is a standing engineering cost with no end. That maintenance treadmill, not the initial scrape, is the real build-versus-buy decision.
| DIY scraping | Amalgament | |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | One scraper per portal, each built by you | Hundreds of sources, normalized and maintained for you |
| Maintenance | Every portal redesign breaks your scraper | Sources re-pulled automatically; /freshness reports the last pull |
| Normalization | Every source has its own format; you reconcile them | One schema across every record type |
| Entity resolution | You match records across sources by hand | Records joined to one entity per business or parcel |
| AI agents | You build the tool integration yourself | MCP-native, agent-callable out of the box |
| Time to first record | Weeks of scraper engineering | One API call, 500 free credits to start |
Government portals are inconsistent, rate-limited, and redesigned without warning. A scraper that works today breaks silently next quarter, and you find out when your data goes stale. Multiply that by every state, county, and city you need, and maintenance eats the project before it ships.
Even with perfect scrapers, you are left with a pile of records that name the same company five different ways. Turning that into one entity per real-world business, without wrongly merging two, is the actual value, and it is a separate, harder problem than fetching the pages.
Language models cannot reliably scrape a government portal mid-conversation, and you do not want them to. Amalgament gives an agent structured ground truth over MCP instead, so the model reasons while the server supplies the records. That is not something a scraper can offer at all.
Coverage · Learn: entity resolution · MCP server
For a single portal, sometimes. Across dozens, the maintenance, normalization, and entity-resolution cost is exactly why teams move from scraping to an API.
Yes, all of it is public record. Amalgament's value is access, normalization, and the join, not exclusivity, so you skip the pipeline instead of paying for the data.
More comparisons: vs OpenCorporates · vs A plain data API