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: each Monday it emails a digest that matches your specific HTS codes against the titles of the prior week's BIS Federal Register notices. The former Comment Filing package ($49) and Inclusion Rebuttal package ($99) are closed and not for sale — the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 / FR 2026-15961 comment window closed, and we do not take payment for a filing we cannot submit. Watchlist $29/mo emails a Monday digest of new BIS notices whose titles match your codes; templates stay free DIY.
P0Why are there one-time purchases and a subscription?
Because the problem has two shapes. Monitoring is continuous — new Section 232 derivative notices from Commerce and USTR arrive on no fixed schedule — so the Watchlist is monthly. When a specific request threatened your product, that was a one-time fight inside a short comment window. The Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 / FR 2026-15961 window is closed; the former $49 comment-filing and $99 inclusion-rebuttal packages are not for sale. Watchlist $29/mo is the live SKU.
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 on a recurring schedule against 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. The former one-time $49/$99 filing packages are closed and not for sale after the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 window; there is no live refund policy for a SKU we are not selling. If you purchased during that window, email support and we will handle it case-by-case.
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 whenever a new notice publishes.
P1What was in the $49 Comment Filing package, and can I still buy it?
That package is closed and not for sale. During the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 / FR 2026-15961 window it was a guided build of a formal opposition comment against a BIS inclusion request: argument structure, the economic-impact framing BIS actually weighs, formatting for the docket, and filing instructions. Templates stay free DIY. Watchlist $29/mo emails a Monday digest of new BIS notices whose titles match your codes.
P1What were the $99 Inclusion Rebuttal and $49 Comment Filing packages, and are they still sold?
Both packages are closed and not for sale after the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 / FR 2026-15961 window. Historically the $99 rebuttal was the deeper treatment — full rebuttal document assembly, domestic-availability and substitutability arguments, supporting-evidence checklist — and the $49 comment was a structured docket voice. Templates stay free DIY. Watchlist $29/mo emails a Monday digest of new BIS notices whose titles match your codes.
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 a Watchlist subscription ($29/mo) 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. The former $49/$99 filing packages are closed and not for sale after the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 window.
P2Is the Founding Trio bundle still available?
The Founding Trio bundle is retired. It was a one-time bundle of PixelProof, EntryProof, and TariffWatch, and it is no longer sold — not sold out, not waitlisted, withdrawn. Each product is bought on its own; current pricing is on /pricing. If you already paid for a seat, your access is honoured — email support and a human will answer.
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. The former filing packages are closed; if a future window reopens a paid draft, you'd 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. The former $49/$99 filing packages are closed and not for sale after the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 window. If you file a free DIY template yourself, flag anything confidential before you submit; we help you see what belongs in a public version, not file as you.
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?
The digest job runs on a fixed weekly schedule (Mondays, 09:00 UTC) with monitoring on the job itself — a failed run 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 Section 232 derivative notices, other Federal Register notices, and proclamation changes against your specific HTS codes, then alerts you with plain-English impact — "a notice proposes adding your code to the steel derivatives list; comment deadline flagged if one is offered." Plus the free HTS lookup, free DIY templates, and a weekly digest. The former $49/$99 filing packages are closed and not for sale after the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 window.
P0What were "inclusion requests," and what replaced them?
From February 2025 until April 6, 2026, domestic steel and aluminum producers could petition BIS to add derivative products — by HTS code — to the Section 232 tariff lists. Proclamation 11021 terminated that inclusion-request process on April 6, 2026. New derivative articles now come through Commerce and USTR notices, on no fixed schedule, and Commerce and USTR may (as with BIS-14) ask for public comment first, but are not required to. If your code is added, the Section 232 duty applies to the full customs value of the article at the rate the notice sets (generally 25%, or 50% for articles comparable to Annex I-A). Miss the notice, and the first you hear is your broker's invoice.
P0How fast do I get alerted when something affects my codes?
The $29 Watchlist is a weekly digest, not a same-day alert. Every Monday at 09:00 UTC it emails the Bureau of Industry and Security Federal Register notices from the prior 7 days whose titles match your HTS codes (the digest matches your codes against notice titles, not full text), with any comment deadline flagged, and it still sends on a quiet week so you can tell "nothing matched" from "the monitor died." A notice can therefore reach you up to about a week after publication. When Commerce and USTR do seek comment on a proposed addition, the window can be short (BIS-14's ran about three weeks), so read the digest the day it lands.
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?
The prior 7 days of Bureau of Industry and Security Federal Register notices whose titles match your codes (the digest matches your codes against notice titles: full code, 6-digit subheading or 4-digit heading), each with a link to the Federal Register document, its document type, FR document number and publication date, plus any comment deadline flagged. USTR, USITC and CBP feeds are not scanned. On a quiet week you still get a short "nothing matched" 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* — often when the duty bill arrives. Watching new Section 232 derivative notices against your specific HTS codes is forward-looking regulatory surveillance, which is a different job from entry filing. By the time a change reaches your broker's workflow, any comment window where you could have fought it may already be closed. We work upstream of your broker.
P0Versus hiring a trade attorney?
Trade counsel is irreplaceable for strategy and formal proceedings, and priced accordingly. But paying counsel to *watch the Federal Register* is lighting money on fire. The efficient split: TariffWatch monitors ($29/mo); counsel handles what genuinely needs a lawyer. The former $49/$99 comment-filing packages are closed and not for sale after the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 window.
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 a Section 232 notice'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)?
Both are enterprise platforms, and neither Descartes nor Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE Global Trade Management publishes self-serve pricing on its product pages (checked September 14, 2026) — budgeting either one means a sales conversation. 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 — open the portal every business day an inclusion window is open, open each request's annex to scan for your codes, and track each comment clock yourself. That's a real part-time job, done by whoever forgets it first. We are, quite literally, the automation of that job.
P1ChatGPT/Claude can summarize tariff news for me.
Monitoring is a plumbing problem, not a summarization problem. What we do is not summarizing: every week we pull the Bureau of Industry and Security Federal Register notices, match each document against your specific HTS codes, track the docket deadlines, and link the primary source on every alert so you can check us. (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 named in a Section 232 notice 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 new Section 232 notices typically arrive late, 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. Since Proclamation 11021, new 232 derivative notices come on no fixed schedule, and any comment period is set notice by notice. 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 Section 232 tariff (up to 50%, on the full customs value) on 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.
Section 232 inclusion decisions have weighed the docket — domestic availability, substitutability, economic impact — and proposed additions have been narrowed and denied where importers showed up with substance. What's certain: an empty docket reads as no opposition. A structured comment was the cheapest seat at that table during the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 window; that $49/$99 file-for-me path is closed and not for sale. Watchlist $29/mo emails a Monday digest of new BIS notices whose titles match your codes; templates stay free DIY.
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 former comment and rebuttal packages (closed after the Aug 27 2026 BIS-14 window, not for sale) structured *your* submission with *your* facts; you (or your counsel) filed as yourself. Free DIY templates work the same way. For matters needing a licensed trade attorney, we'll say so explicitly.
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.