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2026-05-20 · Harry Vass

The data we don't have (and why that's fine)

An honest scope statement for ausdata.io. What we ship, what we deliberately don't ship, and the better source to go to for each gap, CoreLogic, Kyckr, NEMOSIS, ICA NFID, and more.

Most data-API marketing pages are an exercise in selective omission. The vendor lists what they have, in big confident bullets, and lets the prospect discover at integration-time that the specific dataset they actually needed isn't there.

This post does the opposite. It's the honest scope statement for ausdata.io: what we ship, what we deliberately don't ship, and, most usefully, where to go instead for each gap.

If you're doing due diligence on whether this fits your use case, read this before you sign up for the free tier. It will save you both time.

What ausdata.io is

ausdata.io is a thin, citation-clean wrapper over the public statistical and regulatory data published by nine Australian government agencies:

  • ABS, national statistics (CPI, labour force, national accounts, etc.)
  • RBA, monetary statistics, F-tables
  • APRA, prudential / banking statistics
  • AIHW, health and welfare statistics
  • ATO, taxation statistics, ACNC charities
  • ASIC, corporate registers (company list, license list)
  • AEMO, wholesale electricity (NEM dispatch, aggregate)
  • WGEA, gender-pay-gap statistics
  • Open-Meteo (BOM under licence), historical and forecast weather

All nine are CC-BY licensed public data. None of them are paywalled, scraped behind logins, or licensed from a private aggregator. If you wanted to, you could go to each source agency's website and download all of it manually, ausdata.io is just the version of that workflow that takes one HTTP call instead of nine afternoons of XLSX wrangling.

The signals (/v1/economic-dashboard, /v1/real-rate-regime, /v1/cost-of-living, etc.) are cross-source aggregates the agencies themselves don't publish, but every component is from those nine sources.

What ausdata.io deliberately is not

Here's the long version of "honest scope", the categories of AU data that *look* like they should be in ausdata.io but aren't, and where to actually go.

1. Suburb-level property prices

Not in scope. ABS publishes a quarterly *Residential Property Price Index* for the eight capital cities at the city-aggregate level. That's it. Anything more granular, median sale price by SA2, median rent by postcode, days-on-market by suburb, is not public data. The dataset is owned by CoreLogic (formerly RP Data, now part of CoreLogic Inc.) and licensed commercially.

Where to go instead:

ausdata.io will never have suburb-level property prices. The data is genuinely behind a commercial licence.

2. Live KYC / per-company financial lookups

Not in scope. ASIC publishes the register of companies (the list, with ABN/ACN, status, name) but does not publish per-company financial filings, beneficial-ownership chains, director cross-holdings, or live disqualification flags through any public API. The ASIC Connect search is the canonical interface and it's deliberately not machine-friendly.

ausdata.io exposes the ASIC company register via /v1/data/asic/ASIC_COMPANIES, that's a 2GB+ static dataset of every registered Australian company, refreshed weekly. It is not a real-time KYC product.

Where to go instead:

  • Kyckr, official ASIC reseller with real-time per-company pulls
  • InfoTrack, Australian-focused KYC + property due-diligence
  • Vigil, emerging player on AML/KYC workflows
  • illion, credit + business intelligence

If your use case is "verify this ABN is real and active in under a second," ausdata.io's /v1/data works fine (it proxies the public ABR lookup). If your use case is "investigate this company's directors, related entities, and recent filings," you need a real KYC vendor.

3. 5-minute wholesale electricity dispatch

Partially in scope. /v1/data/aemo/trading_price and /v1/data/aemo/* cover the daily and 30-minute aggregate dispatch tables AEMO publishes through its public reporting surface. That's enough for "yesterday's price duration curve" or "this week's renewable share by region."

But if you're doing algorithmic trading or operational forecasting on the NEM, you need 5-minute settlement data with full bidstack detail, and you need it within seconds of dispatch. ausdata.io doesn't ship that.

Where to go instead:

If you're an energy trader, use NEMOSIS or OpenElectricity. ausdata.io's energy endpoints are for dashboards, policy commentary, and ESG reporting, not trading.

4. Address-level natural-hazard exposure

Not in scope. This is one of the most-requested gaps and one of the firmest "no" answers. Per-property bushfire, flood, and cyclone risk is not published as a public API by any government agency in Australia. State emergency services publish maps. The Bureau of Meteorology publishes climatology. ICA publishes the National Flood Information Database to insurers. None of it lands as a free public API.

Where to go instead:

This will not change. Don't wait for ausdata.io to ship address-hazard scoring.

5. Real-time payments / NPP transaction data

Not in scope. APRA publishes monthly aggregates of payment-system flows. That's months-old, not real-time, and not transaction-level. Real-time payments data is owned by NPPA / AusPayNet and licensed to participants only.

Where to go instead:

6. Personal microdata

Never in scope. ABS does release Confidentialised Unit Record Files (CURFs) and TableBuilder microdata under restricted access. That's a controlled-environment, vetted-researcher path. ausdata.io will never expose individual records, every series is at the published aggregate level the source agency releases publicly.

Where to go instead:

Why deliberately staying narrow is the product

It's tempting to say "we'll add CoreLogic when we hit $X revenue." We won't. Here's the reasoning:

  1. CC-BY public data has no per-call licence cost. Once we cache it, marginal cost is near-zero. We can offer $29/mo because our COGS is hosting, not data licensing.
  2. Commercial data resale is a different business. CoreLogic, Kyckr, Geoscape, these vendors actively police resale. Wrapping them would put us on the wrong side of contracts on day one.
  3. The "one citation-clean envelope for nine public sources" niche is well-defined. It has a clear "yes/no" boundary. The moment we mix in commercial data, every endpoint needs a per-source licence footnote and the simplicity vanishes.

We'd rather be the best version of a narrow product than the second-best version of a broad one.

When ausdata.io is the right answer

You're a good fit if you need:

  • Macro indicators (CPI, cash rate, unemployment, GDP) in code, with citations
  • AU policy / sector commentary that needs source-of-truth aggregates
  • A dashboard widget showing live RBA/ABS data
  • A LLM agent that can answer AU economic questions and cite the agency
  • A release-day automation for ABS/RBA prints
  • A historical time series for backtests or charts

You're not a good fit if you need:

  • Suburb-level property valuations
  • Real-time KYC or beneficial-ownership lookups
  • Live NEM 5-min dispatch with bidstacks
  • Address-level hazard exposure
  • Per-customer transaction microdata

Read that second list carefully before signing up.

Pricing

  • Free: 500 calls/month, enough to evaluate whether the fit is real
  • Analyst: $29/mo, 10k calls
  • Pro: $99/mo, 100k calls

Every tier gets every endpoint and full history. Grab a key at ausdata.io.

Sources

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