epitaxy

US federal drug shortages and recalls joined to the federal contracts that buy those drugs. One call, no signup.

What we claim and what we do not. We claim: this government supplier has an active FDA shortage or recall. We do NOT claim that a given contract delivers a given drug. Federal contract descriptions average 47 characters and almost never name the drug.

Try it right now

curl https://drugs.crossgrain.xyz/v1/exposure?limit=5

No key, no account, no rate limit tied to you. A response looks like this, one row shortened:

{"tier": "free", "count": 5, "results": [
  {"exposure_id": "0026624dec7b6d9f",
   "award_id": "SPE2DP25F109W",
   "company_id": "a4fdd4a7530f4962",
   "company_name": "TEVA PHARMACEUTICALS USA, INC.",
   "company_key": "teva pharmaceuticals usa",
   "shortage_id": "022c478fb3af28c4",
   "confidence": "probable",
   "match_method": "company_name_normalized"}]}

company_name is the name as the source reports it. company_key is the normalised form we match on, so you can group rows without normalising them yourself.

Read confidence every time

value	what it means
exact	match on a shared identifier, for us an NDC inside FDA
probable	normalised company name, or a token match on the drug name
weak	softer match, an indication only

A match on the company AND on the drug at the same time is NOT promoted to exact. A cross source join is never exact, because FDA and USAspending share no identifier. Anyone claiming otherwise has a different source or is guessing.

Free tier

Always on, no key and no signup. It returns at most 20 rows, without the evidence field, without weak matches, and from a data version 24 hours old. Nothing is stored: no counters, no IP addresses. If a version that old does not exist yet, you get the oldest one we have, so the free tier is never empty while data exists.

Paid tier

plan	price	what you get
Starter	29 USD/month	10 000 calls	coming soon
Pro	99 USD/month	100 000 calls plus the daily delta feed	coming soon
x402	0.004 USD per call	USDC on Base, no signup	no signup, just call
Bulk dump	199 USD	one off, Stripe only	coming soon

After payment the key is created automatically and shown once on the return page. Only its hash is stored, so nobody, us included, can read it a second time.

MCP

Remote: https://drugs.crossgrain.xyz/v1/mcp. Local: uvx epitaxy-mcp or pip install epitaxy-mcp. Five tools, and they work without a key.

Addressing

Every segment has its own path. The first two addresses below are equivalent and both will work permanently:

https://drugs.crossgrain.xyz/v1/exposure
https://drugs.crossgrain.xyz/drugs/v1/exposure

Further segments will arrive as /devices/v1/..., /food/v1/... and so on. A path whose segment is reserved but not live yet answers 404 with segment_not_live, it never returns another segment's data. An address that has once been published is never withdrawn.

Paths

/v1/meta data freshness, public and always free
/v1/shortages, /v1/recalls, /v1/contracts
/v1/exposure the join itself
/v1/exposure/company/{company_id} every row for one company
/v1/exposure/contract/{award_id} every row for one award
/openapi.json, /llms.txt

Sources and licences

openFDA, US public domain, CC0 1.0. USAspending, US public domain, code under CC0. The data is unverified and is not a basis for treatment decisions.