Who reaches for this data, and what they are trying to do
Why this matters. The same question means different things from different people. Placing someone correctly usually decides the answer before any detail does. Foundation: Who is actually in the market?
Two populations buy from us, and they behave nothing alike.
The self-serve half
People who sign up on the site without talking to anyone. By share: developers around half, algorithmic and quantitative traders a fifth, companies and institutions another fifth, students the remaining tenth.
Treat that as a shape, not a measurement. The categories are self-declared and they overlap — a student building a trading bot is in two of them — and the split moves. It is worth knowing that this half of the base is mostly technical people serving themselves; it is not worth quoting to a client as a statistic, and you will never need to guess which box the person in front of you came out of.
What follows from "serving themselves" is the part that changes your answers: nobody walks a self-serve signup through anything. The documentation and the client libraries are the whole of their product experience, which is why a useful reply to one of them usually points at one or the other.
What they build: display and calculation inside their own product, backtests, training material for language models, market signals, and automated trading.
The business half
Clients who arrive through a conversation and sign a contract. By share: fintech roughly two thirds, then asset managers, consultancies, banks and news portals.
What they build: portfolio analytics tools, stock screeners, and personal finance applications. Note how ordinary that list is. Most of our data ends up inside software that never mentions us.
Geographically the weight is American, then British, then a long tail through Germany, Switzerland, Australia, France and Canada, across some forty-five countries.
Four doors, four kinds of question
Independent of which half someone is in, they reach the data through one of four routes, and the route tells you what they actually want:
- The developer integrating us. Calls the API or an SDK. Cares about response shape, limits, and which endpoint answers the question.
- The analyst in a spreadsheet. Writes no code at all. Reaches the data through an add-in.
- The researcher who wants a pile of history. Wants a bulk download, not a loop.
- The person whose client is an assistant. New, and growing fastest: reaches the data through a tool server or a packaged skill, and may never see a URL.
Unit 3 is the map of those four doors.
Why the placement does the work
"Do you have a Python library?" has a literal answer — yes, pip install eodhd, and
it hands you a DataFrame — and a question sitting underneath it: how much work is
this going to be for me? Answer only the first and you are accurate; answer only
the second and you have dodged. Answering "we have an API" does neither: it is true,
and it leaves them exactly where they started.
The one-line install answers both at once, which is why it ends the conversation.
Try it now
Take the last product question you heard from anyone. Place the person in one of the four doors, then write the answer that door deserves. If the two answers differ, that difference is this lesson.