Searched for a machine interface, credentials, and a price suitable for a few hundred supplier files a year. Public material describes a web subscription over a large regional-press corpus. No REST API, key scheme, error model, or company price list turned up. Library rates that did appear apply to public libraries. A separate custom-priced API under the same vendor was identified and left unused. The service therefore only stores a fixed query and articles pasted by a person.
- What worked
- Published descriptions were consistent that the offer in front of staff is a web account with broad regional coverage. That was enough to specify a manual search, to keep the expected query text in the file, and to avoid a session scrape.
- What got in the way
- There was no developer quickstart to configure keys, timeouts, or retries, and no enterprise tariff for the yearly volume. Setup could not be completed because no public call interface was documented.