About
TradeFacts.io exists because tariff data infrastructure shouldn’t be a distraction from your product.
The Origin
The US Harmonized Tariff Schedule is public information. USITC publishes it. It’s available. And yet, every customs brokerage software company and every trade compliance SaaS vendor ends up solving the same problem: how do we get this data into our system, keep it current, and know when it changes?
The naive answer is to scrape the USITC website or export from their PDF. The slightly better answer is to use their REST API directly. But even then, you’re dealing with format anomalies, inconsistent field names, schema changes without notice, and no way to know when something changed unless you run your own diff.
The same problem exists on the Canadian side. The CBSA publishes the Customs Tariff as an Access database inside a ZIP file. Getting that into a production API requires parsing, normalization, and ongoing maintenance — work that has nothing to do with your product.
TradeFacts.io is the layer that sits between those sources and your application. We pull from the official APIs nightly, normalize the data, run change detection, maintain version history, and serve everything through a stable JSON API your team can depend on. When the upstream format changes, we absorb it. When rates change, we tell you.
The goal is straightforward: your engineering team should be building features for your customers, not maintaining a tariff data pipeline.
Data Integrity
US data from the USITC official REST API. Canada data from the CBSA official release. Mexico TIGIE data from SNICE (SecretarÃa de EconomÃa) official bulk release. No scraping, no third-party aggregators.
We will not make breaking schema changes without advance notice. Additive changes are announced, not silent.
The nightly pipeline aborts if the incoming dataset falls below minimum record thresholds — preventing partial or corrupted data from going live.
We document known data quirks rather than silently hiding them. The Canada surtax overlay is roadmap, not live — and we say so clearly.
Roadmap
We build based on validated demand. Current status:
Live — 35,733 records, nightly updates from USITC, full change log
Live — 22,461 records, all 23 preferential rate columns including UST, nightly updates from CBSA (Tier 2, 3 & 4)
Live — HMAC-signed push notification when US, Canada, or Mexico rates change (Tier 3 & 4)
Planned — retaliatory surtax notices layered on top of MFN rates as a separate field