It's a big moment here at IEX Cloud. This August, we're launching Apperate: our new platform for data-driven apps, made especially for fintech and app developers.
Think of it like a ready-made backend that makes it lightning-fast to get data into your application.
It’s a big expansion – we still provide easy access to dozens of Core Financial Datasets, plus a whole new suite of data superpowers. Now you can:
- Throw data into Apperate, and we'll make it instantly ready to deliver into your app with an auto-generated API. No time-consuming integration work to get a functioning backend.
- Join and transform your data alongside any of IEX Cloud’s Core Data in one place – you essentially get a database preloaded with production-ready financial datasets.
- Skip the backend maintenance – Apperate is fully-managed, serverless, and makes it effortless to keep all the data you need in our real-time data store to power your app.
Why Apperate?
We built Apperate because we experienced a tedious, time-consuming, $1M+ problem that every data-driven app experiences: data infrastructure.
We started by launching our financial data delivery service in 2019. In the process of building this “first” IEX Cloud, we had to purchase and integrate together a litany of cloud database tooling to support our service.
This wasn’t even the “secret sauce” of IEX Cloud’s functionality – it was the same kind of backend technology every data-driven app needs to build and maintain just to keep the lights on. (Andressen Horowitz summarizes the complexity nicely in this article.) To build this, developers face:
- Weeks (or more realistically, months) spent integrating together all the tools that comprise a backend
- Maintaining that backend for years to come (or forever), and making sure it scales as you add new users and features
- For financial data specifically, normalizing across financial datasets – for instance, so CUSIP data from two years ago can be used along ISIN data from today
We also learned what it feels like to be a startup racing against the clock and to have this integration work arise during the most critical months for the business. While you’re trying to launch your product, find your customers, raise funding, and hire a team in a competitive talent market – the team gets stuck integrating together the backend.
We set out to build something that would help make it go faster.
We built Apperate to automate data infrastructure
We spent the last several years building our own internal backend solution for IEX Cloud, scaling that system, and hiring a full team of engineers to maintain it. We wanted to make that technology available to other teams so they don’t need to spend time building and maintaining it themselves.
That’s how we got here today – we brought together that backend technology into Apperate! It helps teams accelerate app development, get to market faster, and focus more on what makes their app unique.
Apperate is currently in beta – with free data storage until the end of October 2022 – and we can’t wait to keep making it more powerful.
You can sign up for a free 30-trial to see the magic first-hand and get a ready-made backend that works in minutes (not months).
IEX Cloud has always been about making it easier for developers and entrepreneurs to use data. We’re excited to unveil this new phase of our mission – and we can’t wait to hear what you think!
