Anyone can build the search box

Claude, Codex and Grok are here, and a founder can stand up a CRUD app over a weekend. Building got cheap, but owning the workflow did not.

Montenegro publishes every law it passes as a set of page images. Pulling those back into text looks hard and is not. The Official Gazette renders its own digital typesetting, so at three times the size and through a Croatian OCR model the text comes back with the diacritics intact. The register holds 78,308 acts, and about 40,000 of them now have full text. That is a pipeline and a subscription, and a competent person could rebuild it.

The expensive part arrives afterwards. The 2026 VAT law raises the registration threshold to 30,000 euros and does not apply until the country enters the EU, so the 18,000 euro threshold from the older law is the number that governs today. A search box that returns the newest document returns the wrong answer, confidently, to a small business deciding whether it has to register. Nothing in the text says so. Somebody has to know, and keep knowing, every time the law moves.

The tool is a form over a database and always was. What anyone pays for is the promise that the answer is current: that repealed articles never reach the assistant, that a consolidated text from 2021 is labelled as a consolidated text from 2021, that an act with a missing page is published as incomplete.

Code is abundant now, and taste, distribution, operations and systems that stay calibrated are not. The thing worth owning is a legal record somebody will pay to keep correct. The client builds are on the product and SaaS page.