Building a Pet Insurance Comparison Engine: Handling Variable Premiums Across 15 French Insurers

French pet insurance has grown 34% since 2022, driven by rising vet costs and increased pet ownership post-COVID. But comparing products programmatically is a nightmare: 15 major insurers, each with their own pricing grid based on species, breed, age, region, and deductible. Here is how I built a comparison engine that handles this complexity.

The Data Model Challenge

Each insurer publishes premiums differently:

Santévet : JSON API (unofficial, scraped from their quote widget)

Assurimo : PDF tariff grids updated quarterly

Groupama : Static tables by risk category

Dalma : Dynamic pricing engine (quote request required)

The core problem: how do you normalize wildly different data structures into a comparable output?

A Flexible Pricing Schema

{ "insurer_id" : "santevet" , "product_id" : "sv-excellence" , "species" : "cat" , "breed_risk_group" : 2 , "age_min_months" : 12 , "age_max_months" : 84 , "region" :…