We open-sourced 449 real equipment financing quotes so nobody has to trust our math

Commercial equipment financing sites are almost always a black box: you land on a page, see a monthly payment, and have no way to check how that number was actually derived. The APR is picked out of thin air, the "starting at" price is aspirational, and the amortization math is never shown.

We built Equipment Capital Index to do the opposite — every page shows the real per-machine price, the actual amortization schedule, and now we've published the whole underlying dataset so anyone can verify or build on it.

What's actually in the dataset

equipment-financing-rate-data is a CC BY 4.0 dataset of aggregate financing benchmarks computed from 449 individually priced, real machines — construction equipment, ag machinery, trucking fleet, power equipment, and material handling gear. No survey estimates, no fabricated averages.

Current live snapshot:

Category	Machines tracked	Avg APR	Avg est. monthly payment
Heavy Construction	222	8.25%	$3,272
Agriculture	84	7.75%	$4,411
Trucking Fleet	63	8.00%	$2,501
Power Equipment	44	8.50%	$957
Material Handling	36	8.50%	$825

Site-wide average: 8.17% APR, $2,954/mo across all 449 machines.

Why this exists

A couple of principles drove the design:

• Every number traces back to a real machine. Each of the 449 rows has a sourced price (dealer listing, MSRP, or a documented class-typical estimate — and it's disclosed which one) and a real amortization calculation, not a rounded guess.
• The math is reproducible, not just displayed. The same aggregation logic that powers the /press page on the site also generates this dataset — one source of truth computed twice, so the numbers can't silently drift apart.
• It shouldn't require scraping a webpage. The data has three independent, permanent homes:
  • A live JSON API: /api/rate-report.json (OpenAPI spec)
  • A self-updating GitHub repo (regenerates from live data every 3 days via GitHub Actions)
  • A permanent, versioned DOI on Zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.22080110

Try it

curl https://www.equipmentcapitalindex.com/api/rate-report.json

CORS is open, no auth required. If you're building anything that touches commercial equipment costs — a fleet budgeting tool, a research piece, a comparison widget — you're welcome to pull from it directly or cite the DOI.

Feedback and PRs on the dataset repo are welcome.