Daycare & Childcare License Leads Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

Every US state that issues childcare licenses maintains a public registry. Five of those registries are published as machine-readable open-data APIs: New York, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, and Texas. This Actor queries each selected state's official Socrata SODA endpoint, paginates through every record, normalises the columns into a single consistent schema, and delivers one clean dataset row per licensed facility.

The state portals handle pagination internally, apply their own schema quirks, and return data in varying column layouts. We handle all of that per-state detail for you — you get a uniform output regardless of which states you select.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so state API gateways see a genuine browser, not a Python script.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block or rate-limit response.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After header honoured.
• 🧱 Per-state active-only filtering — NY and CT support server-side status filters; we apply them automatically when activeOnly is enabled, so you get live facilities without post-processing.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge (beyond the small warm-up fee).

Use cases

• B2B sales to daycare owners — pull every licensed daycare center in Texas with phone and address, then enrich with email via Clay or Apollo for a targeted outreach sequence.
• Childcare service vendors — playground equipment suppliers, catering companies, and educational software vendors can build state-level prospect lists in minutes.
• Consulting / compliance — regulatory consultants track capacity and status changes across state portfolios without scraping PDF tables by hand.
• Real estate & site selection — developers and municipalities map licensed childcare capacity by county to identify underserved areas.
• Market research — compare childcare supply across states, facility-type mix (family home vs. center), or average licensed capacity by city.
• Insurance & financial services — commercial insurers and lenders targeting childcare operators need addressable prospect lists at scale.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "states": [
    "NY",
    "TX"
  ],
  "activeOnly": true,
  "maxResults": 500,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

statefacility_namelicensee_namelicense_numberfacility_typecapacityaddresscitycountyzipphonestatusemailwebsitesource_urlscraped_at

{
  "state": "TX",
  "facility_name": "Sunshine Learning Center",
  "licensee_name": "Maria Lopez",
  "license_number": "1234567",
  "facility_type": "Licensed Child Care Center",
  "capacity": 72,
  "address": "4500 Oak Drive",
  "city": "Austin",
  "county": "Travis",
  "zip": "78701",
  "phone": "512-555-0198",
  "status": "Licensed",
  "email": "director@sunshinelearning.example",
  "website": "https://sunshinelearning.example",
  "source_url": "https://data.texas.gov/resource/bc5r-88dy.json",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-07T09:00:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Five states only. NY, CT, CO, DE, and TX are currently supported. Other states publish their registries in different formats (PDFs, proprietary portals, bulk downloads); adding each requires custom integration work.
• Status filtering varies by state. CO, DE, and TX datasets don't expose a status column, so activeOnly has no effect on those states — all records are returned.
• TX email and website coverage is partial. Texas includes email and website fields, but not every operator fills them in the public registry.
• Data freshness depends on the state. Each state updates its open-data portal on its own schedule — typically daily to weekly. The scraped_at field tells you when we fetched; the underlying source may lag behind actual license changes.
• No photos, inspection reports, or violation histories. This Actor returns the registration-level metadata only. Inspection and complaint data live in separate datasets.