FRED Economic Indicator Tracker – Macro Data API

A FRED API wrapper and macroeconomic-data feed that pulls observations for any FRED series — CPI, unemployment, interest rates, GDP, housing — and normalizes each into a clean record: series id, date and numeric value. Pass multiple series at once. Use it to build an economic dashboard, a macro signal for fintech, or automated indicator monitoring with revision awareness.

Who uses it

Fintech and investing products, economic-research and strategy teams, dashboard builders, and quantitative analysts.

Why this is worth charging for

FRED is the canonical macro source, but its API returns string values (with '.' for missing), one series at a time, and dumps every vintage. This actor coerces values to numbers, handles missing markers, lets you fetch several series in one run, and delivers a deduplicated, newest-first observation feed ready to chart or alert on.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "seriesId": "CPIAUCSL",
  "date": "2024-05-01",
  "value": 313.207,
  "realtimeStart": "2024-06-12",
  "realtimeEnd": "2024-06-12",
  "source": "FRED"
}

Input

Field	Description
apiKey	Free key from https://fredaccount.stlouisfed.org/apikeys. Required.
seriesId	One or more FRED series IDs, comma-separated, e.g. CPIAUCSL,UNRATE,FEDFUNDS.
observationStart	Earliest observation date.
observationEnd	Latest observation date.
units	Optional FRED units transform, e.g. pch (percent change), chg, pc1.
limit	Observations to return per series (newest first).
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.01, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• observation-record — $0.005 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

Pulling a few indicators' latest values costs pennies. A schedule that appends the newest observation each release bills only new data points with onlyNewSinceLastRun.

Source & reliability

Data comes from the official api.stlouisfed.org/fred service; a free API key is required. Values are coerced to numbers and FRED's '.' missing marker handled. No proxies required. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Do I need an API key?

Yes — a free FRED key. It goes straight into the input.

Can I fetch several indicators at once?

Yes. Pass a comma-separated list of series IDs and each observation is tagged with its series.

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Need the rest of the record on these companies?

This actor returns one source. KYB Company Data Enrichment takes a company name and returns what the public record says about it across up to nine sources — state business registries, UCC lien filings, tax warrants and WARN layoff notices, the FMCSA motor-carrier census, the CMS NPI Registry, USAspending federal awards, EPA ECHO compliance, SEC EDGAR filings and CourtListener federal dockets.

Every enriched field carries its source and its match confidence. Only matches above the accept threshold are merged — anything weaker is surfaced as a suggestion and never folded into the record, because a false join is worse than returning nothing.

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