Why GovPing exists
Most regulatory changes are invisible
The Federal Register publishes final rules, proposed rules, notices, and presidential documents. It has a good API. Every compliance tool indexes it.
That's about 10% of what actually changes.
The other 90% happens on agency websites. An FDA guidance page gets quietly revised. A state insurance commissioner publishes a bulletin as a PDF. The SEC updates its staff guidance without a press release. OSHA changes an FAQ answer. A state AG issues an enforcement priority memo.
No API. No RSS. No structured data. No notification system. Just a webpage that changed sometime between yesterday and today.
Compliance teams call this checking "the agency websites." 76% do it manually, every week, across dozens of tabs. The enterprise tools (CUBE, FiscalNote, Thomson Reuters) cover the formal publications. The dark matter, they miss.
We call it regulatory dark matter. It's binding in practice even when it's not binding in law. Miss a guidance change and your next audit goes differently.
We monitor the sources nobody else covers
GovPing watches 1,763 government and regulatory sources. Federal agencies, state regulators, courts, industry bodies. When something changes, AI reads the page, classifies the change (instrument type, jurisdiction, effective date, who it affects, what action is required), and publishes it. Structured. Searchable. Free.
Every change gets annotated in ORCA format (Open Regulatory Change Annotation). The same structured fields whether the source is a Federal Register final rule with a clean API or a state insurance department PDF on a legacy .gov site with nothing.
That's the point. One format for everything. The structured source and the dark matter, treated identically.
The data is public. The annotation should be too.
Regulatory data is published by governments using taxpayer money. It's public by law. The enterprise platforms charge $10K-50K/year not for the data, but for the taxonomy, the analysts, and the workflow.
AI replaced the analysts. Changeflow's scraping infrastructure replaced the per-source integrations. The cost of monitoring, enriching, and delivering regulatory change data collapsed by 95%.
So we give it away. Not a free trial. Not a crippled demo. The full index, every change, every annotation, every day. Published as RSS, JSON API, and browsable HTML. Consume it however you want.
Changeflow (the company behind GovPing) makes money when organizations want more: custom URL monitoring beyond government sources, team features, advanced filtering, private tracks, SLA guarantees. GovPing is the free layer. Changeflow is the paid product built on top.
There is no XBRL for regulatory change. We're building one.
Healthcare has FHIR. Cybersecurity has STIX/TAXII. Financial reporting has XBRL. Regulatory compliance has nothing. Every GRC platform has its own proprietary schema. Every content provider builds bespoke connectors.
ORCA (Open Regulatory Change Annotation) is our attempt to fix that. It extends the Federal Register API schema to cover all regulatory sources. Same field names where they overlap. Extended with AI-enriched fields where they don't. GovPing is the first and reference implementation.
The spec is at govping.org/orca
One founder. One scraping grid. One mission.
GovPing is built by Steve Butterworth, founder of Changeflow . It runs on Changeflow's monitoring infrastructure (Changegrid), which fetches and diffs pages using a tiered architecture designed to reach the sources nobody else can.
No VC. No board. No obligation to put the index behind a paywall. The mission stays the mission.