501see Nonprofit Data API
The most developer-friendly nonprofit data API
Hey IH. I’ve just listed 501see Nonprofit Data API, the developer side of the nonprofit data platform I’ve been building.
I spent seven years in nonprofit technology and kept seeing the same problem: developers needed nonprofit data, but the available options were either raw IRS files, limited lookup APIs, or expensive solutions bolted on to enterprise contracts.
Cause IQ’s API requires a Pro or Enterprise subscription, with Pro listed at $5,988/year. Candid does not publish standard API pricing and routes developers through a subscription and account-manager process.
501see is built as a self-serve developer product:
Free includes organization name search, EIN lookup, and latest-filing lookup.
Basic is $49/month and adds the broader read API for organizations, filings, grants, officers, foundations, and funder portfolios.
Pro is $99/month and adds asynchronous exports and signed webhooks.
The data is normalized from nonprofit and IRS 990-derived sources, and refreshed as soon as updated filings are published. In reviewing the documentation for Candid, Cause IQ, and ProPublica, I could not find anything about outbound data-change webhooks.
That is one of the features I loved building! It seemed like a natural extension, yet no one seemed to be doing it. Yet it's exactly what I would want as a software engineer.
The goal is to let developers add nonprofit data to directories, CRMs, donation flows, research tools, and internal systems without negotiating an enterprise contract or building an IRS ingestion pipeline.
You can grab a free API key and have your first request working in about two minutes:
I’d especially appreciate feedback from developers who have had to work with nonprofit or foundation data. What did you use, and where did it fall short?
3 Comments
The self-serve angle makes sense, but I’d be curious whether the biggest friction was actually the enterprise pricing or simply getting developers to care enough about nonprofit data in the first place.
Those are very different problems.
Fair question 😂
The presence of the Cause IQ (and to some degree Candid) APIs indicates there is at least some market that wants this. There's another provider that charges (I think) $15/month just for the lookup and verification piece.
So I'll be the first to admit that this is not a unicorn, but for the engineers who need access to up-to-date data, the existing options are not great.
That’s a useful distinction. It’ll be interesting to see whether the existing demand translates into enough willingness to pay at the self-serve level.