Financial Data Provider

Introduction
For any student in finance or data science, getting access to high-quality financial data is crucial. Unfortunately, it's often a hard task. Students typically deal with two hurdles: the high cost of professional data services and the technical skills needed to use them. Most platforms are built for large companies, not for individuals on a student budget with limited coding experience. This project focuses on the need to solve this very problem by creating a tool specifically designed for the student community.

Goals
The core idea was to build an interactive dashboard that would empower students to find the best financial data providers for their specific academic needs. This broke down into three main goals. First, a personalized ranking system was created, where students could weigh criteria like cost, ease of use, and data quality to see which providers best matched their priorities. Second, the aim was to lower the technical barrier by integrating sample API queries and providing ready-to-use Python code snippets. Finally, the project involved a thorough comparison of low-cost and free-tier providers, ensuring the evaluation was genuinely useful for students.

Method
The process began by identifying a pool of relevant financial data providers. A list of providers was gathered and narrowed down by analyzing their popularity with Google Trends.

To create the ranking itself, a multi-attribute decision-making technique was used known as the Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) method. This allowed to score each provider on a consistent 1-to-10 scale across numerous detailed criteria. For simplicity, these scores were then grouped into four main categories a user could adjust: User-Friendliness, Documentation, Functionality, and Cost. The dashboard itself was brought to life using Python's Dash framework, a powerful choice for building analytical web apps. Also popular Python libraries were integrated like yfinance, alpha_vantage, and finnhub-python to make the data retrieval examples practical and realistic.

Result
The result is a fully functional, interactive dashboard that gives students the power to make informed choices about financial data providers. It's a practical solution that tackles the initial challenges of high costs and technical complexity head-on.

Feedback from students who tested the tool was overwhelmingly positive. They found the dashboard intuitive and effective, highlighting the real-time ranking updates and the clear, card-based layout as particularly helpful features. By allowing users to test API queries and generate code directly, the tool makes it significantly easier for them to start their own projects.

Ultimately, this project successfully fills a critical gap, offering students a powerful and accessible resource to build their skills and conduct sophisticated analysis without the usual barriers.