About
A small company in Markham, Ontario, building one thing well.
Why we built it
Bookkeepers, insurance brokers, payment reps, cleaners, sign makers and business lawyers all sell to the same customer: a business that didn't exist last month. The owner is choosing suppliers right now, and they tend to keep the ones they pick first.
The information that a business has just been licensed is public. Ontario municipalities publish it as open data. But it arrives as raw tables mixing renewals, amendments and cancellations with the occasional genuinely new licence, and almost nobody has the time to diff them every morning.
So that's what FileSignal does. We collect the releases on the publisher's schedule, keep the history of every licence we have seen, flag what is actually new, clean it up, and deliver it the same morning.
Why recency
A lead is worth most in its first two weeks.
Licence issued
The city records the new licence.
Same morning
FileSignal's daily collection picks it up and flags it new.
Weeks 1–2
The owner is setting up: insurance, payments, bookkeeping, signage, cleaning.
Months later
The business appears in directories and purchased lists. Most choices are made.
Data ethics
The rules we build by.
Open licences only
We use data that publishers release under licences permitting reuse, and we pass their attribution requirements on to customers. If a licence is unclear, the source stays off.
No scraping
We read documented open-data APIs and file downloads. We don't crawl web pages, log in anywhere, or work around access controls.
No Google Places data
We don't call Google Maps or Places, and we don't store their data. Contact details come only from the public record itself.
Provenance on every field
Each value records the dataset it came from, the source record id and when we fetched it, so anyone can check it against the original.
Residential suppression
Home-based registrations and inherently home-based licence types are removed before anything is shown or delivered. Personal names are never published.
CASL-aware by design
We explain consent, identification and unsubscribe rules to customers, collect express consent for our own email, and use double opt-in for every newsletter.
Independent
Not a government service.
FileSignal is an independent company. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or acting for the City of Toronto, any other municipality, the Province of Ontario or the Government of Canada. We republish public information under the publishers' open licences.
If you run a business and want to know what we show about it — or want a record suppressed — use the contact form. Our privacy policy explains how.