I launched Open Exchange Rates (http://openexchangerates.org) - the Robin Hood of exchange rate (FX) data - which collects exchange rates every hour and distributes them for free via a GitHub repository, in a nice, clean, simple JSON API - with values going back to 1999.
It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects - big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice people.
Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features for a very small cost.
The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at a far cheaper rate than the current incumbents!
Are you crawling for this data? Also, since currency is a tricky thing to price (almost any bank/broker can trade currencies) how do you select the "most correct" price?
Yeah, currently collecting from Yahoo! Finance, which has a fairly accurate but hard-to-use API. Advantage that OXR offers is that it's super easy, and responses are about 10x faster and 350x smaller.
Pretty soon it'll be collecting from other services too and taking averages, with a few slightly more complex moving parts, as well as calculations and statistics - that's where we need to beef up the server and start making some dough though.
Also very soon we're starting to collect other types of 'freely available' trade and economics data, and adding value to it in other ways!
It's currently running at 160,000 requests a day, from 45,000 unique IPs. Lots of those are mobile apps, lots of shopping carts, economics research projects - big users include Flattr, WooThemes (WooCommerce), and some other nice people.
Doesn't make any money because it was designed as a free service - but I'm currently re-architecting it from scratch to offer vastly improved features for a very small cost.
The data will always be free and open to anybody. The big fish I'm going for are partnerships with big institutions and colleges/universities, offering much more accurate and wide-ranging financial/economic data and statistics at a far cheaper rate than the current incumbents!