Gazette Search
SA Government Gazette intelligence platform — 900,000+ notices searchable by ID number in seconds; bulk-screens 50,000 IDs in under 60 seconds.
Industry
Legal & Financial Services — Collections
Timeline
6+ months (in production)
Services
Product Strategy, SaaS Architecture, AI-Assisted Development, Data Engineering
Overview
Gazette-Search is a B2B SaaS that turns South Africa's Government Gazette into a search engine collections agencies, BPOs, banks and lawyers can actually use. The associate who set the requirement was blunt: 'unless you can get results in under 5 minutes, my industry isn't interested — we've tried this before, with a developer, pre-AI, and it was a mess.' The finished product returns matches against 900,000+ notices in seconds and bulk-screens 50,000 IDs in under 60 seconds — the manual baseline takes hours, days, sometimes months.
The Challenge
Large SA collection agencies and BPOs run hundreds of thousands of searches per month against the Government Gazette — verifying deceased estates, insolvencies, liquidations, sales in execution and name changes. Every existing access path was broken in a different way: the official government source rejects programmatic search, the popular community mirror had started returning broken files, and the legally-clean public archive was frozen at 2021. A false 'nothing found' isn't cosmetic here — it puts lawyers in courtrooms and collections analysts into recoveries that should never have been opened.
Our Approach
One developer, one repo, a pragmatic stack. The build started in Lovable for UI velocity, then moved to Claude for the repo-wide query and index work needed to hit sub-second search against millions of rows. Hundreds of prompts later — over several months — the system returned matches in seconds against a 2GB database from a single web instance. When a data audit surfaced a 29.6% silent gap in historical coverage, we backfilled from the authoritative public archive, wired a weekly fetch against the official source for everything from 2022 onward, and quietly created retroactive watchlists for 507 previously failed searches — no 'we're sorry' email, just the answer users originally came for.
Batch ID check — up to 50,000 IDs matched against 25 years of Government Gazette notices.
Results
Here's what the project delivered — measurable outcomes that speak for themselves.
Gazette notices indexed, 25 years of coverage
900,000+
Bulk-screened in under 60 seconds
50,000 IDs
Search turnaround vs the manual baseline
Seconds vs 8 months
Per-search pricing across the volume curve
R35 → R0.55
Go deeper
Read the full build story or try the product
The long-form case study covers the Lovable-to-Claude pivot, the 29.6% data crisis, five infrastructure war stories, the customer-ethics call, and the credits-plus-Enterprise pricing model.
More work
View all case studies
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