Keeping watch

vahti

Finland publishes a great deal about itself, and then buries it in registers, notification feeds and PDF archives that nobody has time to watch. vahti reads those sources on a schedule, most of them nightly, and tells you when something that matches your saved search moves: a building permit next door, a tender in your trade, a recall on something in your kitchen, a grant call you were going to miss.

What it reads

Every section relays one authority's open data as that authority publishes it, with the source, the licence and the update rhythm printed on the service's own sources page.

Fibre rollouts: Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, open data (CC BY 4.0). The source itself refreshes once or twice a year.
Product recalls: Tukes and vaarallisettuotteet.fi, the Finnish Food Authority, and the EU Safety Gate. Read nightly.
Grants and public funding: The State Treasury's haeavustuksia.fi open data, nightly, with every link pointing at the official call.
Building and action permits: The Finnish Environment Institute's built-environment system Ryhti (CC BY 4.0). Ryhti is in its 2025 to 2028 transition, so coverage genuinely varies by municipality, and the service says so rather than implying a complete national picture.
Public procurement: Hilma, the Ministry of Finance's official notice channel, through its own read interface. Nightly.
Businesses and trademarks: The Finnish Patent and Registration Office and the Business Information System, over the open interface. Registered businesses only.
One organisation's whole public-money record: No new source: it joins the rows above on the business identifier alone - registry data, grants awarded, state purchase invoices and procurement - and shows registered organisations and public bodies only.
Consultation rounds: The Government's project window and lausuntopalvelu.fi, daily, linking to the official request for comments.
State spending and purchasing power: The State Treasury's state purchase-invoice data (CC BY 4.0), and for the cost-of-living section Statistics Finland's StatFin price, wage and income statistics (CC BY 4.0) with the Tax Administration's annual fringe-benefit decision.

What it does not do

It does not resell the data, and it is not an official channel for any of it: every result links back to the authority's own record, which is the version that counts. It does not build profiles of private people. The business section shows registered organisations, not the personal details of the people behind them, although some public registers, trademark applications in particular, contain applicant names as published. It does not guarantee that a source is complete, correct or current, and it says so plainly instead of implying otherwise.

Where it stands

Live, in Finnish, free. Eleven sections are in use today. Browsing and searching are free and always have been; saving a watch takes one sign-in, by an emailed link rather than a password, and that same sign-in works across every section. Email alerts are free in the sections that have them, and each section's page says whether it does. There are no fees and no billing anywhere in it.

vahti.orgSources and licences, section by section, are at vahti.org/tietoa. The same watch one level up, in English, is Vigla.

Elsewhere: vahti·Vigla·Asuntodata·Gamecove·Facet·Forge·keeplocal