Firstclasspostcodes
UK Postcode and Address lookup API
Two customers on one day... 🎉🍻
I've reached out to them personally to see find out more about their use case to discover more about the customers that are finding Firstclasspostcodes.
I'm going to focus now on:
- Completing documentation for all the libraries.
- Improving organic SEO.
- Decreasing the latency of the address autocomplete operation.
Every good SaaS provider needs libraries that help customers integrate with their API quickly and easily. The goal was to produce libraries in:
- React
- Vue
- Svelte
- JS/HTML
- Javascript
- Java
- Go
- PHP
- Python
- Ruby
For local testing, I was also able to produce a locally mocked version of the API which is distributed inside Docker! 🎉
Finally landed on a company name, deployed the infrastructure to AWS and integrated all the third parties. It was now down to the crawlers to build up a complete dataset.
The initial deployment was on AWS using a multi-region architecture, powered by API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB.
It took a long time to build up a reliable training set of data, but around this date, I had a reliable training set of data that consisted of over 10,000 addresses.
Using these addresses, I trained my machine learning algorithm to begin organising the data that my crawler had harvested so far.
There are lots of places on the internet that contain sources of information for crawling addresses and are openly licensed.
On this day, I built and deployed the first crawler to begin storing this information for further analysis with machine learning.
Why do Postcode Lookup APIs cost so much?
They use the Royal Mail PAF file, which is a licensed data file containing every address in the UK. But they're the only ones that have this data, so they've got a monopoly (at best).
Surely this information is available elsewhere on the internet? Let's investigate!
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