Workflow Vendors Becoming Direct Competitors
Shovels
The strategic risk is that system of record vendors can move from selling workflow software to selling the data exhaust that workflow creates. OpenGov already exposes permit records, inspections, fees, approvals, contacts, activity logs, and webhooks through its Permitting & Licensing API, while PermitFlow captures reviewer comments, resubmission loops, and real approval times inside submission workflows. If those vendors package multi city feeds, Shovels could end up buying critical inputs from companies that also sell rival data products.
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This is not just a scraping risk. The source systems sit where permits are filed and reviewed, so they can see workflow events that public issued permit records often miss, like change requests, inspection updates, internal status changes, and payment activity. That gives them a richer raw dataset before normalization even begins.
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OpenGov has the clearest path to monetization because it serves about 2,000 governments, runs a unified cloud platform, and already provides authenticated API access. A vendor like that can charge for authorized feeds, set permissions, and make third parties depend on its schema, uptime, and commercial terms.
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Shovels still keeps an important advantage because no single govtech vendor controls the full market. Shovels aggregates across more than 2,770 jurisdictions, while the overall U.S. permit landscape spans more than 20,000 jurisdictions with inconsistent portals and taxonomies. That fragmentation preserves demand for a cross vendor normalization layer.
The market is heading toward a split between workflow vendors that monetize first party operational data and aggregators that stitch the whole country together. The winners will be the companies that combine broad jurisdiction coverage with the most useful proprietary signals, whether that comes from owning the filing workflow or from being the best cross system data layer.