A better alternative to FederalRegister.gov email alerts.
FederalRegister.gov's free alerts are excellent infrastructure — the raw firehose, in your inbox, no charge. The problem is they fire on the word, not the substance. A keyword match on "medical device" gives you Class I scheduling corrections, ceremonial notices, and the actual classification rule, all in the same bucket. regflow runs every new publication through a classifier that scores it 1–5 for compliance impact and only alerts you when it crosses your team's threshold. Same source. Different filter.
§ 01 Honest head-to-head
Where they're better, we say so. Where we're better, we say why. No tables of green checkmarks vs red Xs.
| Dimension | regflow | FederalRegister.gov alerts |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free public feeds. $79/mo for custom watchlists on Pro. | Free, forever. Run by the U.S. government. |
| Filtering model | LLM-classified materiality (1–5) per document. Watchlists filter on score, topic, and keyword — alerts only fire when something substantive crosses your threshold. | Pure keyword + CFR-citation + agency match. Fires on every publication that contains your term, regardless of substance. |
| Per-alert content | Summary, materiality score, one-line action directive, extracted key dates (comment deadlines, effective dates), topic tags, named entities. | Document title and link. |
| Volume per day | Typically 0–3 alerts/day per watchlist on a focused scope, materiality-thresholded. | Often 5–30 alerts/day for active areas like FDA medical devices or trade-remedies — most of which are noise. |
| Deadline extraction | Comment deadlines, effective dates, compliance dates, and hearing dates are pulled from operative text and surfaced in the RSS title and the audit page. | None. Deadlines live inside the document body — you read each one to find them. |
| Topic dedup / clustering | Near-duplicate notices (10 arms-sales transmittals on the same day, etc.) collapse to one row with "+N similar" in the feed. | One alert per matching publication. Repeat notices arrive as separate emails. |
| Audit page per document | Every classified document has a public URL with the classifier input, the score, the rationale, the topics, and the extracted dates — forwardable to internal teams. | Direct link to the FederalRegister.gov rendering of the source document. |
| API / JSON | JSON endpoint per watchlist, plus the FR API itself (the same upstream). | Yes — FederalRegister.gov has a great public API. If you have engineering resources, you can build something like regflow on top of it. |
§ 02 When to pick FederalRegister.gov alerts
FederalRegister.gov's own alerts are the right call if you have an analyst willing to triage a high-volume keyword feed by hand, or your scope is narrow enough that the keyword filter alone is precise (a single CFR citation, a single agency rulemaking docket). It's free, it's reliable, and it's the canonical source. Most compliance teams start here — and many never need to leave.
§ 03 When to pick regflow
regflow is the right call when the free alerts produce more volume than your team has time to read. The most common moment people switch is when they realize they're spending 30 minutes a day deleting noise emails — a $79/mo subscription replaces that with 0–3 pre-scored alerts that lead with the deadline. We are not better infrastructure than the government's free product. We are a better filter on top of it.
§ 04 Questions buyers ask
Why do you call yourselves an 'alternative' to a free product?
Because that is what most people are searching for. The free product is excellent at being a firehose; the friction is the filtering. We are an alternative for buyers who have outgrown the firehose, not a replacement for it.
Can I keep my FederalRegister.gov alerts and use regflow too?
Yes, and most users do exactly that. Keep the official alerts for documents you absolutely cannot miss; use regflow as the prioritized layer on top. Many in-house counsel run both feeds in parallel for the first 30 days, then turn off the keyword alerts once they trust the materiality scoring.
How is your data different from the free FR API?
It's the same upstream data. We pull from the same Federal Register API the government publishes. The difference is the classification layer, the materiality score, the extracted dates, and the audit page on top.
What does the free tier on regflow include?
All public pre-built feeds (trade-remedies, FDA device classifications, defense exports, pipeline safety, federal elections, OFAC sanctions) are free to subscribe to via RSS or JSON. Custom watchlists scoped to your exact terms require Pro at $79/mo.
Try regflow with no card.
Browse the live feeds, read a sample audit page, subscribe in any RSS reader. 30-day Pro trial whenever you're ready.