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Zelothorn
Zelothorn

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I built an API that explains public companies in plain English — and won't give buy/sell advice

If you've ever tried to pull company data from SEC filings, you know the pain: EDGAR gives you raw XML, filings run hundreds of pages, and turning any of it into something a normal person can read is a real project. I wanted that data in plain English, as clean JSON, without building the whole pipeline myself. So I built it.

What it does

You hit one endpoint with a ticker:

GET https://zelothorn.com/api/v1/company/AAPL
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And you get back structured JSON:

  • company — name, ticker, CIK
  • summary — a plain-language explanation of what the company does and how it makes money
  • earnings — whether the latest quarter beat or missed estimates, plus recent history
  • filings — key and recent SEC filings, each linked to the official document
  • links — direct links to SEC EDGAR and the company's page

No key required right now. You can try any ticker in your browser or drop it straight into your app.

The decision behind it

The API explains what a company is and what it has filed. It does not do analysis — no price targets, no ratings, no buy/sell signals, no valuations.

That was a deliberate choice. A tool that gives buy/sell output is a different and riskier kind of product, and every tool in this space seems to drift toward it eventually. I wanted to see if the explanation layer is useful on its own, separate from the prediction layer everyone rushes to add.

The question I have

That is the part I am unsure about, and it is why I am posting instead of just shipping quietly:

If you are building something — a portfolio tracker, a finance newsletter tool, a fintech side project — do you want company data pre-explained in plain English? Or do you just want the raw numbers and you would rather write your own summaries?

The pitch, if the answer is "pre-explained," is basically: don't spend hours parsing SEC data and writing company-description components — drop this in and get readable company data in a few minutes.

But I genuinely don't know if that is a real need or just something I found neat to build. So I would take any honest reaction, including "this already exists" or "I would never use this." Data comes from SEC EDGAR plus an earnings source; summaries are generated and cached. Built solo.

There is a live example you can try here: https://zelothorn.com/developers

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