DaycareScan — licensed daycare search and inspection records for the United States

Why I built DaycareScan

Inspection reports for daycare centers are public in every US state — but they live in fifty different licensing portals, each with its own quirks and none designed for a nervous parent comparing three centers on a Tuesday night. That fragmentation is the product opportunity.

DaycareScan, an own product, pulls those licensing records into one national, parent-friendly search. As the homepage puts it: data from official government sources, free and public, updated weekly — useful to families first, and to researchers studying childcare quality as well.

Feature set

• Search by facility name, city or ZIP code, plus state-by-state browsing with live counts (California lists over 43,000 facilities; Texas over 25,000).
• Facility profiles combining inspection histories, violation details, licensing status and compliance summaries.
• Daycare Report Card — an instant safety report for any licensed facility: inspections, violation counts, compliance status.
• Recently inspected feed surfacing the latest inspector visits nationwide.
• In-depth childcare guides on licensing systems, daycare regulations, and comparing infant, toddler and preschool programs.

Build notes

The platform is fully custom — Laravel and PHP, no off-the-shelf CMS, themes or plugins. Ingestion pipelines collect and normalise records from each state licensing agency into a MySQL schema designed for hundreds of thousands of pages, and the weekly refresh runs end-to-end without manual steps.

Distribution is pure programmatic SEO: every facility, city and state page ships with unique metadata and structured data, server-rendered for speed. Building for that scale — millions of inspection rows behind snappy pages — is precisely the kind of engineering I offer clients with large catalogues or datasets.