I spent 7 years in nonprofit tech and built a tool to replace the $5,000/yr data products everyone hates.
Hey IH. I'm building 501(see), a search tool for nonprofit financial data. I wanted to share the backstory and where things stand, since I think this community would have useful perspective.
The background
I worked at a nonprofit CRM company (Kindful, later acquired by Bloomerang) for seven years. In that world, everyone needs access to nonprofit financial data: grant writers researching funders, fundraisers doing prospect research, salespeople finding leads. The data itself is public record. Every nonprofit in the US files a Form 990 with the IRS every year, and those filings contain revenue, expenses, executive compensation, grants awarded, board members, everything.
The problem is that the tools for accessing this data are either terrible or wildly expensive:
Candid (GuideStar): The incumbent. Premium plans start at $1,199/yr for a single seat. API starts at $4,800/yr. You have to talk to sales just to get pricing. The free tier shows almost nothing useful.
990 data is typically years behind.
CauseIQ: Built for B2B sales teams. Starts at $349/mo for a single user. Per-seat pricing. 460+ filters that overwhelm the actual target user. $0.50/record export fees.
GrantStation: $199/yr for a curated database of 15,000 grants. Cheap but users complain about "few results."
Grant Frog: $99/mo for 2 users, annual contract required. Only 190K foundation profiles. Requires a sales demo to get started.
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer: Free and genuinely good for one-off lookups, but no grant search, no bulk search, no export, and the API hasn't been updated since 2016.
There's a massive gap between "free but limited" and "expensive with annual contracts and per-seat fees." That's what I'm building into.
What 501(see) does:
Search across 2M+ tax-exempt organizations and 21M+ foundation and federal grant records. Filter by state, cause area (NTEE code), revenue range, and amount. See officer compensation, grant data (who gave how much to whom), and multi-year financials. All extracted from IRS 990 filings, 990-PF filings, and Federal Audit Clearinghouse data, normalized across form types.
The live site has a working demo on the homepage where you can search real data right now, no sign-up required.
There's also a full REST API with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec and an MCP server for AI agent integration. Nobody else in the space is even thinking about this.
Pricing: free tier with real utility, then $99-149/mo with a 30-day free trial. No annual contracts. No per-seat fees (competitors charge per user). No per-record export fees. Cancel anytime.
Where things stand:
Product is functional with a live demo and real data
8 blog posts live targeting SEO keywords ("guidestar alternatives," "nonprofit ceo salary," "990 lookup," "ntee code list," etc.)
Getting search impressions (175/day, average position 20.6) on the right keywords but traffic is still a trickle (~48 total visitors)
Early feedback from people in the space has been positive. A sales rep at a nonprofit SaaS company called the grant discovery feature a recurring pain point.
Hosting costs are affordable on Hetzner. I need exactly one paying customer to be at pure profit.
Just shipped API key management, cause area filtering on grants, and structured data on org pages for SEO
What I'm looking for:
Mostly just getting the word out at this stage. If you work in or around the nonprofit space, I'd love to hear whether this resonates. If you've built SEO-driven content plays for niche B2B tools, I'd love to hear what worked.
And if you want to poke around the site and tell me what's broken or confusing, that's valuable too: 501see.app
Thanks!
