OSINT for the people who don't have a 24/7 ops center.

The OSINT tooling market has two camps. On one end, enterprise platforms priced for Fortune 500 SOCs and federal law enforcement — sales-led, demo-required, six-figure annual commits. On the other end, hobbyist scripts and command-line tools that get the job done but produce work product nobody wants to defend in deposition.

The middle — small private investigators, M&A diligence teams at boutique firms, insurance fraud SIUs, investigative reporters at lean newsrooms — gets squeezed. They have the same investigative need as the enterprise buyers, but none of the budget or staffing for a six-figure platform.

Tracelight exists to close that gap. One product, $49/month to start, sign up in 60 seconds, run your first investigation before lunch. The same 32-worker OSINT engine the bigger platforms run, but with self-serve access and the citation trail baked in so the report you generate is something you'd be proud to put in front of opposing counsel.

Why the citation trail matters

Every claim in a Tracelight report links to an evidence row, which links to the raw API response that produced it. Months later, if a finding ends up in a deposition, you can re-run the lookup, see the exact source, and prove the chain of custody. That's the difference between OSINT as a hobby and OSINT as professional work product.

We've seen real cases lost because the investigator's report said “subject was found on dark-web forum X” without anything underneath. When the defense subpoenas the methodology, “I Googled it” doesn't survive cross-examination. We built Tracelight so that conversation never happens to you.

What we believe

• Self-serve beats sales-led for the middle market. The smallest meaningful unit of a customer is one PI with a case to close tonight, not a procurement committee.
• Defensibility is a product feature, not a service add-on. Audit trails and reproducibility belong in the schema, not in a separate compliance module sold for an upcharge.
• Pricing should be public.If you have to call to get a quote, the answer is “more than you can afford.” We don't do that.
• FCRA-aware by default. Consent capture is the first thing the product asks for on employment-screening cases. Compliance isn't an afterthought.

Where we are

Tracelight is built and operated from Miami, Florida, by a small team. The product is actively used by an early-access cohort of private investigators, diligence shops, and journalists across the US, Canada, and the UK. We are not a venture- backed land-grab — we're a deliberate, sustainable software business that wants to ship the best product in our segment of the market.

If you're an investigator who wants the kind of tooling the big platforms have without the procurement cycle, you're who we built this for. Sign up — the 7-day trial is enough to know whether it earns its keep.