TariffWatch FAQ library
The full 50-question objection library covering section 232 hts-code monitoring. Grouped by pricing, trust, technical, comparison, objections, and legal. The top 20 (all P0 plus highest-value P1) also surface on the TariffWatch landing for fast-scan buyers; this page keeps the complete set for research-mode readers.
Pricing
P0What does TariffWatch cost?
The HTS lookup tool is free — use it right now, no signup. The Watchlist is $29/mo: we monitor your specific HTS codes against BIS inclusion requests and Federal Register actions, with alerts and a weekly digest. One-time packages: the Comment Filing package at $49 (file an opposition comment against an inclusion request, guided end-to-end) and the Inclusion Rebuttal package at $99 (full rebuttal build for a request that directly targets your products).
P0Why are there one-time purchases and a subscription?
Because the problem has two shapes. Monitoring is continuous — inclusion requests appear on BIS's schedule, not yours — so the Watchlist is monthly. But when a specific request threatens your product, that's an event: you fight it once, hard, inside a 14-day comment window. Pay for the fight when there's a fight.
P0Is there a free trial on the Watchlist?
Yes — full access up front, downgrade if it's not for you. And the free HTS lookup means you can confirm we correctly understand your product's tariff exposure before spending anything. If the lookup impresses you, the Watchlist is the same engine running continuously on your behalf.
P0Refunds?
Watchlist annual: 30-day money-back. Watchlist monthly: trial first, and genuine problems handled case-by-case at support — we don't advertise a window, we just behave decently. One-time packages ($49/$99): if we fail to deliver the package as described, full refund; if you used the filing and the government ruled against you, that's the government, not the deliverable — but talk to us anyway.
P1Can I cancel the Watchlist anytime?
Yes, self-serve, effective end of period. Your watchlist configuration and alert history stay attached to your account, because tariff exposure has a way of becoming urgent again in May, September, and January.
P1What exactly is in the $49 Comment Filing package?
A guided build of a formal opposition comment against a BIS inclusion request affecting your HTS codes: argument structure, the economic-impact framing BIS actually weighs, formatting for the docket, and filing instructions with the deadline tracked for you. What takes trade counsel a billable afternoon, structured for you at $49.
P1What's in the $99 Inclusion Rebuttal package versus the $49 one?
The rebuttal package is for when an inclusion request directly targets your product line — deeper treatment: full rebuttal document assembly, domestic-availability and substitutability arguments, supporting-evidence checklist, and review before filing. The $49 comment is a strong voice in the docket; the $99 rebuttal is a defense brief.
P1Is there a bulk or annual deal on the Watchlist?
Annual gets two months free ($290/yr vs $348). If you need many HTS codes across multiple entities (brokers, trade consultants watching for clients), email us — that's a conversation we're happy to have.
P2What's the gift option I saw at checkout?
You can buy any package or Watchlist subscription for a colleague — common between brokers and their importer clients, or between a compliance manager and their counterpart at a sister company. Enter their email at checkout; they get onboarded, you get the goodwill.
P2What's the Founding Trio bundle?
$99/mo for TariffWatch + EntryProof + PixelProof — the whole portfolio, five slots total. If you're an importer, TariffWatch + EntryProof together cover both your tariff exposure and your CPSC eFiling obligations for less than most single tools. See /pricing.
Trust & security
P0What data do you need from me?
Very little: your email and the HTS codes you care about. We don't need entry documents, supplier names, or transaction values for monitoring — the watchlist works on codes alone. If you buy a filing package, you'll share product details needed for the arguments, which stay between us.
P0Is my watchlist confidential? My HTS interest is competitively sensitive.
Yes, and we understand why you're asking — a watchlist is a map of your supply chain exposure. Your codes are never shared, sold, aggregated into public stats, or visible to other customers. Encrypted in transit and at rest, US infrastructure, access limited and logged.
P1Are you SOC 2 certified?
Not yet — small company, honest roadmap item. What we hold for most customers is an email address and a list of HTS codes; we're glad to walk your security team through the full architecture, and Stripe holds all payment data (PCI DSS Level 1).
P1GDPR/CCPA?
Compliant in practice for the personal data we hold: export and deletion on request at support, no data sales, standard contractual clauses with processors (Stripe, Vercel, Supabase). Most of your footprint with us is public-domain regulatory data plus your code list.
P1When I file a comment through your package, is my information public?
Comments filed in a BIS docket are public by design — that's how the process works and it's the point of filing. We flag exactly what will be public before anything is submitted, and we help you structure arguments so confidential business information stays out of the public version.
P2Who's behind TariffWatch?
Digital Empire Holdings LLC, Wyoming. Small, founder-run, obsessive about Federal Register plumbing. Support answered by someone who can tell you what BIS did yesterday, within 12 business hours.
P2What if you miss an alert?
Our pipeline polls the Federal Register and BIS continuously with health monitoring on the pipeline itself — a dead poller pages us, not silence. No monitoring service anywhere honestly promises perfection; what we promise is redundant checks, a paper trail, and straight answers if something slips. Your weekly digest doubles as proof-of-life.
P2Can I delete my account and data?
Yes — email support and we hard-delete within 30 days, confirmed in writing. Filing packages you purchased are delivered as documents you keep; nothing of yours is hostage.
Technical
P0What does TariffWatch actually do?
It watches the Section 232 derivatives process for you: monitors BIS inclusion requests, Federal Register notices, and proclamation changes against your specific HTS codes, then alerts you with plain-English impact — "a request was filed to add your code to the steel derivatives list; comment window closes in 14 days." Plus the free HTS lookup, filing packages when you need to fight, and a weekly digest.
P0What are "inclusion requests" and why should I care?
Domestic steel and aluminum producers can petition BIS to add derivative products — by HTS code — to the Section 232 tariff lists. If a request covering your code succeeds, your imports get hit with the 50% tariff on the steel/aluminum content. These requests are filed during three annual windows (May, September, January), and the public comment period on each is short. Miss it, and the first you hear is your broker's invoice.
P0How fast do I get alerted when something affects my codes?
Same day as publication, typically within hours — our cron polls the Federal Register API and BIS continuously. Speed matters here more than almost anywhere: comment windows on inclusion requests run about 14 days from posting, and building a real opposition takes most of that.
P0How long does setup take?
Minutes. Run the free HTS lookup to confirm your codes, add them to your Watchlist, done. No integrations, no imports, no IT ticket. The hard part of this problem was never setup — it was knowing what happened in the Federal Register this morning.
P1I don't know my HTS codes precisely. Can you help?
That's what the free lookup at /hts-lookup is for — search by product description, see candidate codes and their current 232 status. For genuinely ambiguous classifications, your broker's classification is authoritative; feed us that and we'll watch it. We'd rather point you to the right answer than guess.
P1Do you cover current tariff rates or just future changes?
Both. The lookup shows current Section 232 status for a code — including the 50% rate on steel and aluminum in effect since June 4, 2025, and whether the code sits on a derivatives annex. The Watchlist covers the forward-looking part: pending requests and rule changes that would alter that status.
P1What's in the weekly digest?
Everything that moved in your world that week: new inclusion requests touching or near your codes, comment deadlines approaching, BIS determinations issued, relevant proclamations or Federal Register actions — each with a one-line "what this means for you." No movement, short digest. We don't pad.
P1Do you cover other tariffs — Section 301, IEEPA actions, antidumping?
Today we're deliberately deep on Section 232 steel and aluminum derivatives, because the inclusions process is uniquely fast-moving and under-covered. Broader tariff coverage is roadmap, demand-driven — tell us what you'd pay to watch and you'll shape the order.
P2Can I watch codes for multiple companies or clients?
Yes — brokers and consultants do this today. One account, multiple watch groups. If you're managing serious client volume, email us about arrangements that fit how you bill.
P2Is there an API?
Not publicly yet. If you want alerts feeding your TMS or Slack, email support — Slack/webhook delivery is on the near roadmap and squeaky wheels get built first.
Comparison
P0My customs broker already tells me about tariff changes.
Brokers tell you about changes that have *landed* — usually when the duty bill arrives. Almost no broker monitors pending BIS inclusion requests per client HTS code, because that's forward-looking regulatory surveillance, not entry filing. By the time a change reaches your broker's workflow, the comment window where you could have fought it is closed. We work upstream of your broker.
P0Versus hiring a trade attorney?
Trade counsel is irreplaceable for strategy and formal proceedings — at $400-800/hr. But paying counsel to *watch the Federal Register* is lighting money on fire. The efficient split: TariffWatch monitors ($29/mo) and handles standard comment filings ($49-99); counsel handles what genuinely needs a lawyer. Several attorneys use us for exactly this reason.
P1The Federal Register has free email alerts. Why pay?
Federal Register alerts are keyword firehoses — they can't match documents against your HTS codes, don't parse an inclusion request's annexes to see if your code is inside, don't track comment deadlines, and don't tell you what any of it means. We read the documents so you read one paragraph. That's the $29.
P1Versus enterprise trade platforms (Descartes, Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE)?
Superb platforms, enterprise pricing — five figures annually plus implementation. If you have a global trade team, buy one. TariffWatch is for the $5-50M importer whose "trade team" is one person with three other jobs, who needs the Section 232 slice covered for $29/mo starting today.
P1Can't I just check the BIS portal myself during the windows?
You can — May, September, and January, checking every business day of each window, opening each request's annex to scan for your codes, and tracking each 14-day comment clock. That's a real part-time job for a few weeks a year, done by whoever forgets it first. We are, quite literally, the automation of that job.
P1ChatGPT/Claude can summarize tariff news for me.
A chatbot summarizes what you feed it or find. It doesn't poll the Federal Register at dawn, doesn't know your HTS codes, doesn't track docket deadlines, and will confidently paraphrase a proclamation it hasn't read. Monitoring is a plumbing problem, not a summarization problem. (We say this as heavy AI users — the plumbing is the product.)
P2There are free tariff-news newsletters.
Read them — genuinely, some are good. Newsletters cover what's newsworthy; your obscure derivative HTS code getting quietly added to an inclusion request is not newsworthy to anyone but you. Broad news and per-code surveillance are different products. We're the second one.
P2My trade association keeps members informed.
Associations advocate at the industry level and inform at the newsletter level — valuable, and slow. Association alerts on inclusion requests typically arrive mid-window or after, and never mapped to your specific codes. Keep the membership; add per-code monitoring.
Objections
P0Tariff policy changes so fast that monitoring feels pointless.
Flip that around: policy changing fast is the *reason* monitoring exists. When rules were stable, nobody needed a watchlist. The 232 derivatives process now moves in structured windows (May, September, January) with real deadlines — fast, but trackable. Chaos you can't see is a threat; chaos you're watching is a planning input.
P0We only import finished goods, not steel or aluminum.
The derivatives lists are exactly about finished goods — the tariff applies to the steel and aluminum *content* of downstream products. Appliances, furniture components, auto parts, hardware — codes people swore were "not a steel product" have been added by inclusion. Run the free HTS lookup; it takes two minutes to know whether this paragraph applies to you.
P0$29/mo for email alerts?
For $29/mo you get continuous per-code surveillance of a process where a single missed comment window can mean a permanent 50% tariff on the metal content of your imports. One container's worth of unexpected 232 duty typically costs more than a decade of the Watchlist. It's the cheapest asymmetric bet in your import budget.
P1You're new. Why trust you with something this consequential?
Because you can verify us before trusting us: the free HTS lookup shows the engine working on your codes, alerts cite the underlying Federal Register documents so every claim is checkable at the source, and the trial costs nothing. We built this to be audited — the citations aren't decoration, they're the trust model.
P1Filing comments never changes anything anyway.
BIS determinations on inclusion requests weigh the docket — domestic availability, substitutability, economic impact — and requests have been narrowed and denied where importers showed up with substance. What's certain: an empty docket reads as no opposition. A $49 structured comment is the cheapest seat at a table where decisions about your costs are being made.
P1My exposure is small — a fraction of our imports.
Then the Watchlist is proportionally cheap insurance, and here's the thing about inclusions: they expand. A code adjacent to yours getting added is often the leading indicator for yours. Small exposure with zero visibility becomes large exposure with zero warning. $29/mo keeps the periscope up.
P2I'll set up my own Federal Register alerts and a spreadsheet.
Genuinely viable if you'll maintain it — and you'll be rebuilding a meaningful chunk of our pipeline: annex parsing, HTS matching, deadline tracking, digest discipline. Most DIY versions die by the second window. If yours survives, you didn't need us; the free lookup is still yours.
P2I need to see it work before committing.
Perfect — that's the design. Free HTS lookup first, trial on the Watchlist second, money third. And if you want a human walkthrough, there's a book-a-demo link on the pricing page. We built the funnel for skeptics because our buyers are professionally skeptical.
Legal & compliance
P0What legal authorities does TariffWatch monitor?
Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (19 U.S.C. §1862) as implemented through the steel and aluminum proclamations — from Proclamations 9704/9705 (2018) through the 2025 actions that ended exclusions and raised rates to 50% (effective June 4, 2025) — plus the BIS inclusions process for derivative products and every related Federal Register publication. Alerts cite the specific document, always.
P0Is TariffWatch legal advice? Are the filing packages legal representation?
No and no. We're a monitoring and document-preparation service — the comment and rebuttal packages structure *your* submission with *your* facts; you (or your counsel) file as yourself. For matters needing a licensed trade attorney, we'll say so explicitly rather than upsell you a package that shouldn't carry the weight.
P1If your alert is wrong or late and I get hit with duties, are you liable?
Our terms cap liability at fees paid — the honest standard for a $29/mo service, since no monitoring vendor can underwrite your tariff bill. What you're buying is a dramatically better information position, a documented one: every alert timestamps what was knowable when. We've never had this conversation after a real miss, and we work daily to keep it that way.
P1Are your filing package documents mine to use however I want?
Yes — deliverables are yours outright. Edit them, hand them to counsel for review (we encourage it on the $99 rebuttals), file them under your name. We keep templates; you own everything built from your facts.
P2How do you handle the difference between proposed and effective actions?
Explicitly — it's the most important distinction in the product. Every alert is labeled: pending request (fight window open), determination issued, or effective with date. Conflating "proposed" with "in force" causes bad sourcing decisions in both directions, so the status taxonomy is strict.
P2Can I cite TariffWatch alerts in internal compliance documentation?
Yes, and it's a good practice — our alerts link the primary Federal Register documents, so your internal record shows both when you learned of an action and its authoritative source. Auditors and counsel like paper trails; ours is built to be one.