Developer builds free real-time market data proxy without paid API keys
A developer created a self-hosted market dashboard called Market Research Cockpit that streams live quotes for A-shares, Hong Kong, US stocks, crypto, and treasury yields without using any paid data APIs. The project was prompted by the high cost of commercial data providers, which charge between $20 and $80 per month, making personal-use polling prohibitively expensive. The proxy layer sits between a React frontend and free public endpoints from sources like Tencent, Sina, Eastmoney, Binance, and OKX, handling caching, deduplication, and character encoding. Key engineering challenges included GBK-to-UTF-8 decoding for Chinese data sources, spoofing required Referer headers for Sina, and falling back to system curl when Node's fetch was blocked by TLS fingerprinting. The proxy uses per-symbol TTL caching and inflight request merging to avoid hammering upstream servers during frequent five-second polling cycles.
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