Canadian sub-trades + brokers + commercial lenders are stuck choosing between three bad options:
- Pay $500–$2,000/mo for ConstructConnect or Dodge — built for enterprise GCs, anchored in US markets, sells consultatively, requires a sales call to onboard.
- Scrape municipal open-data portals themselves — works in theory but takes 4–8 hours per week per city per trade. Most trades don't have the time or the Python skills.
- Live without permit intelligence — react to whatever the GC or landlord sends them. Reactive, not proactive.
Shovel Radar is option 4: weekly pre-segmented Excel for $79–$399/mo, Canadian-native, no demo required. The reason it works is that 80% of the engineering is on the pipeline (15,000+ data-slice emitters across 382 cities), not on the website. Customers get a finished file in their inbox; we get one paying customer at a time.
- Solo founder. Matthew writes the code, answers the support email, sends the invoices, ships the data, fixes the regressions.
- CASL-compliant by design. Shovel Radar does not send cold email on your behalf. We deliver lead lists; you decide how to reach out under your own CASL footprint. Pitches in the deliverable workbooks are templates for HUMAN execution — we never auto-send them.
- Open by default. Public revenue numbers, full data-source provenance, per-city pricing formula. If you want to know how the business runs, the answer is on the site.
- No outside funding. Bootstrapped. Every feature pays for itself or doesn't ship.
- Calgary anchor, national scope. Headquartered in Calgary, but the product serves every Canadian commercial market with usable open data.
Fastest: email matthew@shovelradar.com. Replies inside 24h business hours; same day if you're a paying customer.
Office hours: 30-minute open Calendly slot each week. Email me for the booking link.
Shovel Radar is operated as a sole-proprietorship out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. CASL + PIPEDA + GST-registered. Privacy policy at /privacy.html.
