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DIY vs API.

Make data wrangling someone else's problem.

Get a constant flow of reliable data, with predictable, monthly costs, so that you can focus on your customers.

600 Days

to build yourself.

35 Days

to build with our API.

Building our service yourself versus using our API.

Choosing how to aggregate and process data for your products matters.

You need to be able to trust the data you send to your customers, the cost of gathering and processing data from hundreds of sources can spiral.

That's before you have to consider reliability, back ups, service support and testing.

Building your own.

Below we outline what it takes to mirror create your own procurement data web service in your own business.

Estimated working days: 600 days 

  1. Get list of all of the existing data sources for public procurement
  2. Write a new data harvester for each of those sources, save the 'raw' data.
  3. Write tests and alerts for each harvester, so that you know if it has failed.
  4. Map each new source into a common data standard, including data formatting and cleaning algorithms.
  5. Set up a database with back ups, failover and dynamic scaling capacity.
  6. Create a harvesting platform to trigger and schedule each script you run.
  7. Create a data validation platform to monitor the health of scripts and data.
  8. Create a script to clean up and add country names where no country name or a bad country name is in place.
  9. Create a script to clean up and add addresses where no address or a bad address is in place.
  10. Create a script to categorise all of the data regardless of the language being used in the source data.
  11. Create a script to clean up and make buyer names consistent.
  12. Create a script to clean up and make supplier names consistent.
  13. Build out a search engine that returns data from string searches, values and date ranges.
  14. Set up a website that queries the database and displays results to authorised users.
  15. Add alerts and email notifications for users.

Using our API.

Below we outline what it takes to use create a new web service using the Spend Network API.

Estimated working days: 35 days.

  1. Set up an account with Spend Network.
  2. Query our API and display results to authorised users.
  3. Add alerts and email notifications for users.

We charge for the data and we don't tell you what to do.

See our pricing

Book a demo.

To find out more about how easy it is to create new services, insights and products using our data, book a demo with our team.

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