A clean, developer-friendly API over nonprofit tax filings — revenue, executive comp, grants given — for fundraisers, researchers, and diligence tools.
“Market-tested” means a real shipped product or experiment measured the failure directly (a live user count, a dead auction, a documented shutdown). “Predicted” means the verdict is an evidence-based forecast from the receipts below, not a direct measurement.
Recurring developer asks for structured 990 data, plus documented pricing complaints about Candid's paid products — the raw appetite for this data is real and long-standing.
ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer already IS this product, free: a documented public API over the full 990 corpus with search, organization endpoints, and per-filing data, run by a funded newsroom as public-interest infrastructure. Beneath it, the IRS itself publishes the complete e-file XML corpus as free bulk downloads. So the free floor covers both the API convenience layer and the raw data. What remains paid (Candid's tiers) is human-curated enrichment — grantmaker profiles, verified contacts, historical normalization across form revisions — which is exactly the recurring labor a passive API play cannot supply. A wrapper on free public data with a free public wrapper already standing prices at $0.
ProPublica discontinuing its free API AND the IRS stopping bulk publication — both contrary to their missions and legal mandates. This floor is about as permanent as they come.
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