Explanation
The data is public domain and free to anyone. So what are you paying for? The normalization — one consistent interface over four government APIs that each speak a different dialect.
Government financial data is public domain. SEC EDGAR filings, FRED time series, BEA national accounts, World Bank indicators — all of it is free to download, and none of it is owned by anyone. So the obvious question is why you'd pay for an API over data you can fetch yourself.
Because "free" is priced in weeks. Each source speaks its own dialect. EDGAR ships SGML and idiosyncratic JSON. FRED paginates one way, BEA another, World Bank a third. Four sources mean four response formats, four pagination schemes, four sets of error codes, and four clients to keep alive as each upstream quietly changes. The data is free. The plumbing is the invoice — and it's the sprint nobody budgets for.
That tax gets paid once, by us, so you never see it. You ship the analysis, not the parser.
A hundred endpoints for one source are worth less than one consistent interface across every source we cover. That is a deliberate trade, and it is the core of the design.
One Bearer token. One JSON shape. The same auth, the same pagination, the same error envelope whether you're pulling a 10-K or a GDP series. New sources conform to that pattern — the pattern does not bend to accommodate them. We would rather add a source slowly and keep the interface boring than ship breadth that forces you to read four sets of docs and maintain four mental models.
We don't sell data. The data is public domain — it was never ours to sell. What we offer is the normalization: the layer that absorbs each upstream's quirks and hands back one consistent shape.
That distinction is load-bearing. When EDGAR changes a submission format, or FRED deprecates a parameter, or an upstream starts returning a new error code, that is our problem to absorb, not a change you have to chase across your codebase. The value isn't access to the data. The value is that the interface stays the same while the sources underneath it move.
Knowing what a tool isn't is as useful as knowing what it is. We don't do real-time market data, options chains, or proprietary feeds. That's a different product with a different cost structure, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest about what public-domain government data can give you.
We also don't advertise a roadmap as if it had shipped. Every endpoint listed works in production today. When a source isn't live yet, it isn't counted. Limitations — rate limits, data freshness, known issues — are documented in the open, not buried, because transparency is the only honest way to earn a developer's trust.