501see
Free nonprofit funder search with tracking and reminders
Hey IH. I posted here on May 13 about 501see, the nonprofit financial and grants research tool I’ve been building.
The biggest update is simple: I now have a paying user on the grant product.
That feels like meaningful validation. The core workflow is becoming clearer: search for foundations, inspect their historical giving and recipient portfolios, save promising funders, and manage them as prospects instead of immediately falling back to a spreadsheet.
The harder problem is still distribution.
I’ve spent time looking at Reddit, Facebook groups, technical publications, and SEO. Reddit has been useful for understanding how people talk about these problems, but it has not turned into a dependable traffic source. The directories and publications feel similar: useful to be listed in, but not something I can rely on for discovery.
So the current state is:
1. The product is useful enough that someone is paying for it.
2. The grant research workflow is much clearer than it was a few months ago.
3. I still have not found a repeatable way to get it in front of more nonprofit development teams, grant writers, or consultants.
That’s the main thing I’m trying to solve now. Not another feature. Distribution.
If you’ve sold a niche B2B product into nonprofits, where did your first real users come from? And which channels produced actual conversations instead of just impressions?
Hey IH. I posted here on April 7, 2026 about 501(see) (501see.app), the nonprofit financial and grants search tool I’ve been building to replace the expensive data products everyone complains about.
I wanted to do a quick follow-up because the product has changed a lot in the past month. Not in a “we redesigned the logo” way. More in a “oh, this is starting to feel like something a grant person could actually use day to day” way.
What’s different since April 7
1. I stopped paywalling the stuff that’s already basically free elsewhere.
This was a mindset shift for me. The data is public. If I blur too much of it, it doesn’t feel premium, it just feels petty. So the free experience is meant to be genuinely useful, and the paid tiers are about the workflows that take real product work.
2. Pricing is simpler now.
Free: $0
Grow: $49/mo
Pro: $99/mo
Paid plans include a 30-day trial (card upfront). Month to month, cancel anytime. No per-seat, no per-record nonsense.
3. CSV exports are now real (and async).
This was one of those “if you don’t have exports, you don’t have a product” features.
You can export filtered results for orgs, grants, and officers. Exports run in the background, show up in an exports page, and can email you a link when they’re ready. Grow is capped, Pro is bulk.
4. I added a Prospects feature to track the whole grant process - from research to application to award to compliance reporting.
The goal is: discover a foundation, save it, keep your notes, and not immediately fall back to a spreadsheet. There’s now a much better add-flow, less duplication, campaign assignment, and a per-prospect research brief style worksheet.
5. Foundation pages are getting an “intelligence” layer.
A big chunk of grant research is answering boring but important questions quickly: what do they fund, do they fund orgs like mine, what’s their pattern. I added a generated foundation summary at the top of the profile to make that first 30 seconds less painful.
6. The developer surface matured.
The REST API is still there, but I also have an MCP server that’s actually designed around how agents want to work. The main tool is essentially “give me the full funder intelligence report for this EIN” so you don’t have to chain a bunch of calls.
I plugged the API into a custom GPT using an API key, and it was fun to use. I wish the ICP were as into those tools as I am, but the sector is quite far behind the curve. They are probably going to want traditional UI for quite some time.
What I’m seeing (qualitatively)
The best signal I’ve gotten recently is from people who used to rely on Candid’s foundation discovery before it got more expensive and (in their words) worse. The workflow they describe is consistent:
Geography restrictions
Mission alignment / focus areas
Prior recipients and how often they show up
Then, only then, application complexity and readiness
That’s the shape I’m trying to build toward.
What I’m looking for
If you’ve sold into grant writers, development directors, or grant consultants, what channels actually worked (besides “wait for SEO to kick in”)?
Does $49 / $99 read “accessible” or “too cheap to be trusted” for this market?
If anyone wants to poke at it, I’d love feedback on where the workflow breaks: find a funder, sanity-check fit, save as a prospect, export something you could share with a team.
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!
1 Comment
Getting the first paying user makes the distribution problem much more interesting.
I’d be curious whether the challenge is finding the right channel, or that the people encountering 501see don’t immediately see themselves as the buyer.