A winter-break project
Steve Zheng did not set out to build a data company. Dabbling in stocks and cryptocurrencies as a hobby, he noticed a pain point that felt almost insulting in its simplicity: apart from Bloomberg, which charges thousands of dollars a year, there was simply no affordable or accessible stock data feed for an individual investor who wanted to make decisions with real data. The institutions had terminals. Everyone else had scraps.
So over a winter break while he and his co-founders were in grad school together, Zheng built one. Alpha Vantage began as a passion project — an API for realtime and historical market data, in JSON and CSV, covering stocks, forex, crypto, commodities and dozens of technical indicators. It was the tool he wanted for himself, opened up to anyone else who wanted it. He launched it in March 2017, with no particular expectation that it would become his life's work.
The Yahoo Finance shipwreck
Then, less than two months after Alpha Vantage went live, a large incumbent pulled the plug. Yahoo Finance abruptly shut down its market data API, and the users it stranded — self-described Yahoo Finance shipwreck survivors — came looking for a new home. Seemingly overnight, in the company's own telling, the number of active users and API queries jumped by more than ten times. The team never looked back.
It is the kind of break that only looks like luck from the outside. Alpha Vantage was ready because it had already made the choices those refugees needed: a simple API, a free tier, data in formats developers actually use, and documentation written for people building things rather than for procurement departments. By 2018, the company reported more than 100,000 registered users making more than 300 million API requests a day. Zheng credited Harvard Business School's entrepreneurship ecosystem — he was an MBA student there, and drew heavily on technical coaching from across campus — and a summer internship at Twilio between his first and second years. But the engine was the product's posture: data that had belonged to terminals, handed to anyone with a key.
Democratising data, one API at a time
What followed was a long, unglamorous grind of staying independent and staying open. Alpha Vantage, founded in 2017 by Zheng and Olivier Porte, remained independently operated by its original co-founders and Y Combinator-backed, resisting the fate of the data vendors that get acquired and then rationed. The free tier — 25 requests a day, no credit card required — stayed the front door, while premium plans scaled to hundreds of requests a minute for heavier users.
The point was never to be the cheapest API in the abstract. It was to remove the specific friction Zheng had felt as a hobbyist: the sense that high-quality financial information was available only to large organisations, while the modern trader — who increasingly resembles a software developer reaching for an API rather than a terminal — was left out. Alpha Vantage's bet was that if you serve that developer well, the institutions will follow, not the other way round.
Nine years later: Congress Trades
Congress Trades, launched on Product Hunt on 28 October 2026, is that same bet applied to a dataset that is public in theory and unusable in practice. Members of Congress must disclose their stock trades, but the filings are scattered PDFs — and even after finding them, judging a trade means looking up how each stock performed afterwards. The product pulls every House and Senate disclosure into one place and answers two questions people naturally ask: how much did each member make, and what could you have made copying them?
The comparisons are measured apples-to-apples against the S&P 500 over the exact same days, and the launch post leads with the kind of example that makes the abstraction concrete: in the past 90 days, Ro Khanna lost 0.5% on 817 trades while Nancy Pelosi gained 50% on just 7, against a 2.4% rise in the index. The makers flag the pattern they want users to check for themselves — the heaviest traders track close to the index, while the biggest numbers often come from a few large bets. Start on the leaderboard, then browse the latest filings and the most-traded stocks; each member and stock gets a page with trade history, filing speed, and whether Congress overall is buying or selling.
Why it still fits
Congress Trades is a small product, but it is a faithful one — faithful, that is, to the thesis Zheng started with in grad school. A dataset that only professionals can use is not really public, just as a data feed that only Bloomberg subscribers can afford is not really a market. Browsing needs no account; a free account unlocks past-year rankings and follows, and a paid subscription unlocks the full history, complete rankings and email alerts for new filings.
The through-line from 2017 is easy to miss because the products look so different: an API for developers, then a leaderboard for citizens. But both do the same job — take information that is hoarded, scattered or priced out of reach, and structure it until an ordinary person can act on it. Zheng built Alpha Vantage because he wanted the data himself. Congress Trades is what happens when that instinct meets a decade of practice: the data changes, the instinct does not.
The playbook
- Start from your own unaffordable problem — Zheng started from his own frustration as a hobby investor: apart from Bloomberg at thousands a year, there was no affordable, accessible stock data feed for individuals. Building for yourself first kept the product honest.
- Let a shutdown be your launch — When Yahoo Finance abruptly pulled its market data API less than two months after Alpha Vantage went live, the team absorbed the influx instead of rationing it. A competitor's shutdown became the company's distribution.
- Make the free tier the product — Alpha Vantage's free tier — 25 requests a day, no credit card — is the strategy, not a funnel trick. Broad, free access is what made the API the default for students, developers and indie investors.
- Answer the question, not the dataset — Congress Trades does not present raw filings and call it transparency. It answers the two questions people actually ask — how much did each member make, and what would copying them have made — against the S&P 500 over the exact same days.
- Structure is the democratisation — The leaderboard, the per-member pages and the filing-speed stats all serve one idea: a scattered PDF is not disclosure if nobody can use it. Structure is the democratisation.