I built an Apify actor that turns FMCSA's public carrier census into a daily list of new trucking companies, so I'm biased. I also used an AI assistant to help draft this article, and I reviewed and edited it. The free route comes first because for many people it is all you need.

The problem

Anyone who sells to trucking startups (insurance, factoring, fuel cards, ELD and dispatch software, recruiting) wants one list: companies that registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in the last few days. Those companies are choosing vendors right now. FMCSA publishes the census as open data, but the raw file is a wide table with a text date column and no "what is new since yesterday" view.

The free route

The census is dataset az4n-8mr2 on data.transportation.gov, which runs Socrata, so you can query it with SoQL over plain HTTP.…