Why We Verify Every Grant By Hand Before You Ever See It

It would be much cheaper to build OpenLaneGrants as an automated scraper — point it at government websites, pull down every program that looks like a grant, and show all of it to clients. We don't do that, and it's worth explaining why.

Grant programs change constantly, and quietly

Programs close early when funding runs out. Eligibility rules tighten between fiscal years. Some get paused indefinitely with no clear announcement on the program's own page. A scraper that ran once and never checked back has no way of knowing any of that — it just keeps showing the program as open, because that's what the page said the day it was scraped.

A business acting on stale information doesn't just lose time — it loses trust in the whole process

If a client spends real hours gathering documents and drafting a narrative for a program that quietly closed two months ago, that's not a minor inconvenience. It's the exact failure a grant-finding tool exists to prevent. Every grant that reaches a client in OpenLaneGrants has a status that a person — not a script — confirmed, along with the date it was last checked.

What "verified by hand" actually means in practice

• A person confirms the program is genuinely open, not just listed as open on a page that hasn't been updated.
• Eligibility criteria, deadlines, and award amounts are checked against the official government source — not a third-party aggregator site that may have gotten a figure wrong.
• Every grant carries a last-verified date, so nothing goes stale indefinitely without someone noticing and re-checking it.

This is slower than pure automation, and it means the database grows more deliberately than a scraper-built one would. That's the tradeoff, and it's the one we think matters.