Knowledge Base · Trading automation
A token radar without a paid data feed
The symptom
The prototype assumed a commercial market-data API for everything, which made running costs scale with traffic before the product had any users.
What was actually wrong
Two capabilities were being conflated: knowing that something happened (event notification, which a wallet/webhook provider will push to you cheaply) and knowing whether it is interesting (market data, which a free public API returns at a rate limit that is fine for a low-volume radar).
The fix
The stack was split: a containerised service provisioned with the webhook feed for discovery and the free market API for scoring, with the commercial feed made optional behind a flag rather than required, so the system runs in a degraded-but-useful mode when the paid key is absent.
What we took away
Before paying for a data provider, check whether the problem is event delivery or market intelligence — they have very different price curves, and an architecture that treats them separately can start free and grow into the paid tier instead of depending on it.