Florida Sunbiz Scraper: Export Business Leads Fast

A Florida Sunbiz scraper is an automated tool that pulls newly registered LLCs and corporations from Florida's official business directory (sunbiz.org) and exports them as structured CSV or JSON. The fastest path is the Florida Fresh Business Leads (Sunbiz Scraper) actor on Apify — point it at a date range, run it, download the file. No proxies, no parsing HTML by hand, no rate-limit babysitting.

Quick Answer

A Florida Sunbiz scraper extracts company filings from Florida's Division of Corporations website and outputs lead data — entity name, registered agent, principal address, officers, filing date, and status — in CSV, JSON, or Excel format. The Sunbiz site exposes ~2,000–5,000 new entity filings per business day, and a hosted scraper can pull a full day's batch in under 10 minutes. Pay-per-use pricing on Apify (typically a few cents per 1,000 records) is cheaper than building and hosting your own scraper. Use it for cold outreach to brand-new businesses, registered-agent prospecting, or feeding a CRM with same-day fresh leads.

What is the Sunbiz directory and why scrape it?

Sunbiz.org is the public-facing search portal of the Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations. Every LLC, corporation, partnership, and fictitious name (DBA) registered in Florida lands here within 1–3 business days of filing. Florida added roughly 730,000 new business entities in 2023 — that's ~2,800 per business day — making it the second-largest state by new business formation behind California.

Why this data is valuable for B2B:

• Fresh intent signal: a brand-new LLC needs banking, insurance, accounting, payroll, websites, and legal services now.
• Public and free: no licensing fees, no Terms of Service paywall — Florida statute 119 makes it public record.
• Structured fields: name, mailing address, principal address, registered agent, officers/managers, FEI/EIN status, filing date.
• No competition for the data itself — only for who acts on it first.

The catch: Sunbiz has no official API and no bulk export for daily filings. You either pay $880/year for the state's full database CD (yes, a CD), or you scrape.

How does a Florida Sunbiz scraper work?

A Sunbiz scraper performs three steps the manual user does:

1. Search by date or entity type — query the "Search by Filing Date" or entity-name endpoint.
2. Iterate the results list — paginate through new filings (Sunbiz returns ~50 per page).
3. Open each detail page and parse fields — entity ID, status, principal address, mailing address, registered agent name + address, officer names and titles, filing date, FEI/EIN, last event.

The Florida Fresh Business Leads actor handles all three. You configure inputs in a JSON form:

{
  "filingDateFrom": "2026-05-01",
  "filingDateTo": "2026-05-05",
  "entityTypes": ["LLC", "CORP"],
  "maxResults": 5000
}

Run the actor, wait, download. Output is a flat dataset you can pipe to CSV, Google Sheets, Airtable, HubSpot, or a Postgres table.

What fields does the scraper export?

A typical record from the Sunbiz scraper:

That's enough to skip-trace, enrich with email/phone via Clearbit or Apollo, or push straight into a sequencer.

How do I export Sunbiz leads to CSV?

Three-step workflow:

1. Run the actor on Apify with your date range. The free trial gives you enough credit to test 500–1,000 records.
2. Open the dataset in the Apify console after the run completes (usually 2–10 minutes for a single day).
3. Click Export → CSV (or JSON, Excel, XML, RSS, HTML table).

For automation, hit the Apify dataset API directly:

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/DATASET_ID/items?format=csv&token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -o sunbiz-leads-2026-05-05.csv

Schedule the actor to run every morning at 7 AM ET via Apify Scheduler, then have a Zap or n8n flow drop the CSV into Google Drive or push rows to your CRM. Total setup: ~15 minutes.

How much does scraping Sunbiz cost?

The actor uses Apify's pay-per-use model. Real numbers from typical runs:

• 1 day of new filings (~2,800 records): roughly $0.50–$1.50 in compute + dataset storage.
• 1 month backfill (~60,000 records): $10–$25.
• Daily scheduled run: ~$15–$40/month all-in.

Compare to alternatives:

• State data CD subscription: $880/year + parsing work.
• Building your own scraper: 8–20 dev hours + proxy costs ($30–$100/mo) + maintenance every time Sunbiz changes markup.
• Lead list brokers: $0.10–$0.50 per Florida business lead, often 30–90 days stale.

The scraper wins on freshness and unit economics if you're pulling more than ~200 leads/month.

Is scraping Sunbiz legal?

Sunbiz data is public record under Florida Statute Chapter 119 (Public Records Act). Court rulings — most notably hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn (9th Cir.) — have repeatedly held that scraping publicly accessible data does not violate the CFAA. The Sunbiz Terms of Use ask users to be reasonable with request volume; a well-behaved scraper that respects rate limits and doesn't hammer the site is the standard accepted practice.

Two practical guardrails:

• Don't resell raw Sunbiz data as a "database product" without adding value — the state offers its own bulk product.
• For cold email/SMS outreach, comply with CAN-SPAM and Florida's Telephone Solicitation Act (which got stricter in 2021 — written consent required for autodialed calls/texts).

Who actually uses Sunbiz lead data?

Real use cases that pay back the actor cost in week one:

• Business banking reps: every new LLC needs an EIN and a business checking account. SLA: contact within 7 days of filing.
• Bookkeepers and CPAs: pitch S-corp election and quarterly tax setup before the new owner Googles "Florida small business taxes."
• Commercial insurance brokers: GL and workers comp quotes to new construction, trucking, and home-services LLCs.
• Web designers / agencies: filter for entity names containing "LLC" + industry keywords, pitch a $2,500 starter site.
• Registered agent services: prospect entities using a personal home address as the registered agent — they're prime upgrade targets.
• M&A scouts: track new fictitious-name filings to spot pre-launch brands.

A Tampa-based commercial insurance agent reported closing 3 new policies/month from a $30/month Sunbiz feed — payback ratio ~100x.

How fresh is the data?

The actor reads Sunbiz live, so the data is as fresh as Sunbiz itself. Florida typically posts new filings within 24–72 hours of the entity's filing date. If you run the scraper at 8 AM each morning with a filingDateFrom of yesterday, you'll see the bulk of yesterday's filings plus stragglers from 2–3 days ago.

For maximum freshness, run the actor twice daily (morning + late afternoon) and dedupe on documentNumber.

FAQ

Q: Can I scrape historical Sunbiz filings, not just new ones? Yes — set filingDateFrom to any past date. The state's online records go back to the 1990s for active entities. Large backfills (>100k records) should be chunked by week to avoid timeouts.

Q: Does the scraper return officer phone numbers or emails? No — Sunbiz doesn't publish phone or email. You get names and addresses only. Pipe the output through an enrichment tool like Apollo, Clearbit, or Hunter.io to append contact data.

Q: How do I filter for only LLCs in a specific Florida county? Set entityTypes: ["LLC"] in the input, then post-filter the CSV by ZIP code or city. Sunbiz doesn't have a native county filter, but ZIP-to-county mapping (free from USPS) handles it in one spreadsheet step.

Q: Will the scraper get blocked or banned? The actor uses sensible request pacing and rotating sessions, so blocks are rare. If Sunbiz changes their HTML, the actor maintainer pushes an update — you don't have to debug XPath selectors yourself, which is the main reason to use a hosted actor over a homemade scraper.

Q: Can I push results directly to HubSpot or Salesforce? Yes. Use Apify's webhooks to trigger a Zap, Make scenario, or n8n flow when a run finishes, then map fields to your CRM's contact/company schema. A typical setup: Sunbiz scraper → dedupe in Google Sheets → enrich emails via Apollo → create HubSpot company + contact with a "New FL LLC" lifecycle stage.