About two weeks ago, our integration with Jigsaw broke. Jigsaw is (was) a crowdsourced database of information on businesses, mainly US ones but some in Europe and other places too. It let us provide you with information like this.
We looked into it and discovered that our API key got revoked. We did some digging and realized that Jigsaw had been bought out by SalesForce last year, and Salesforce has decided to kill free access to this API, which apparently became effective around September 1.
The API is still available, if you’re willing to pay. We are definitely willing to pay for this kind of data, but the price is $25,000/year. That works out to just over $2,000/month, which would make it our biggest monthly expense, other than payroll. Sorry, can’t justify that.
For now, we have modified the links that pulled in this data to instead just open up a Google search page with the organization name pre-filled. In some ways this is actually better because Google will almost always find the company in question, regardless of physical location, whereas with Jigsaw, when I wanted to look up info on a company it was only maybe 50% success rate. With Google you’ll have to do a bit of work on your end to find the details that we were previously providing, but at least it’s something.
Alternatives?
If you know of an alternative service that is reasonably priced and includes an API, please let us know. We haven’t found anything worthwhile as of yet. A lot of these services seem more geared towards providing you with “leads” at these companies, rather than just information about the companies themselves, which is not what we’re really interested in at the moment.
