StonkSpill: How I Built a Stock Research App
A lawyer's take on vibe-coded fintech and the surprisingly permissive world of stock data
GUYS! I'm officially a stonk queen now. Built my own stock research app because apparently bouncing between YouTube, Google News, and Reddit like a caffeinated day trader wasn't sustainable.
So here's what was happening. I'd want to research some random company, right? First I'd hit up YouTube to see what the finance bros are saying - you know, the guys with the clickbait thumbnails screaming about MASSIVE GAINS or TOTAL COLLAPSE. Then I'd jump to Google News for actual journalism from people who went to journalism school. Then I’d go look at fifty other sites - Reddit etc.
But I now have the attention spy of a fruit fly, so I'd get distracted by literally everything else on the internet. One minute I'm researching Apple's quarterly earnings, the next I'm discovering that bananas are technically berries but strawberries aren't (I know - INSANE!). It was inefficient and I was getting zero actual research done.
Being the reasonable person I am, and given my AI addiction, I decided to build something instead of just... you know, working on my attention span.
Meet StonkSpill: https://stonkspill.replit.app/ - my latest vibe-coded creation that does exactly one thing and does it reasonably well. You type in a stock ticker, it gives you YouTube videos and news about that company in one place. Revolutionary? No. Useful? Actually, yeah.
The Beauty of Vibe Coding with Free APIs
Here's the thing about building stuff in 2025 - the barriers to entry are basically nonexistent if you know where to look. I discovered that Finnhub has a free API that gives you pretty much all the stock data you could want without charging you. YouTube's API is also free for basic usage. So I thought why not just mash these together and see what happens?
This is what I love about the current state of web development. I had an idea on Saturday morning, found some free APIs by Saturday afternoon, and had a working prototype by Sunday night. No business plan, no funding rounds, no "disrupting the fintech space" - just a developer who wanted to solve their own annoying problem.
The whole thing runs on Replit, and I used ChatGPT to code (which is new - I usually use Claude) which means I didn't even have to think about hosting or deployment. Just code, save, and it's live. This is so different from even five years ago when building something like this would have required setting up servers, paying for data feeds, and probably hiring someone who actually knows what they're doing.
Why Financial Data is Stupidly Easy to Scrape
Here's something that blew my mind: financial news and stock information are probably the easiest things to scrape on the entire internet. And there are solid legal reasons for this.
Most financial data - stock prices, earnings reports, SEC filings is public information that are not copyrightable. Courts have basically said that facts are facts, and you can't own facts. So when Apple reports earnings, that number belongs to everyone. When a stock hits a new high, that's just math, not intellectual property. Makes sense, right?
News articles are trickier because the actual writing is copyrighted, but the underlying information isn't. Note that my app doesn’t copy the news, it links to it. Most financial news sites actually want their content to be discovered and shared! It drives traffic, which drives ad revenue. So as long as you're not wholesale copying entire articles and claiming them as your own, you're probably fine.
If you want to nerd out about scraping laws maybe start with hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn case. It basically established that scraping publicly accessible information doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act but may create liability risk under a breach of contract claim or even common law torts claims. If you want to know what those words mean, drop a comment.
So basically in building a tool like StonkSpill, I'm not trying to steal content or compete with news sites - I'm just aggregating publicly available information to make it easier to consume and I am not violating any website terms of service. I signed up for APIs!
Free APIs: The Great Equalizer
The API economy has completely changed the game for independent developers. Finnhub gives you comprehensive stock data, news feeds, and company information without charging for basic usage. YouTube's API makes video content searchable and embeddable.
What this means is that a solo developer working on weekends can now access the same fundamental data that billion-dollar hedge funds use. The only difference is scale and how you use it. I mean obviously, I didn’t build a Bloomberg Terminal.
This democratization is wild when you think about it. The information asymmetries that used to give institutional investors massive advantages are just... evaporating. Anyone with basic coding skills can build tools that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop in the past. I went with free tools (other than Replit) but if I had paid for some of this info via APIs, I could do so much more.
Try It Out (Or Don't, I'm Not Your Boss)
StonkSpill is live at https://stonkspill.replit.app/. It's free, it works reasonably well, and it might save you a few clicks when researching stocks. The code is probably terrible and there are definitely bugs I haven't found yet, but it does what it's supposed to do.
If you're thinking about building something similar, my advice is simple: find free APIs, solve your own problem first, and don't overthink it. The infrastructure exists to build genuinely useful tools without massive investment or technical complexity.
Just remember - this is not financial advice. It's just information aggregation with decent UI. But if you're tired of juggling multiple tabs when researching stocks, it might make your life slightly less annoying.
And hey, if you enjoyed reading about my latest coding distraction, subscribe for more stories about what happens when lawyers learn to code and then can't stop building things.
Check out StonkSpill yourself at: https://stonkspill.replit.app/
Building financial tools and not sure if you're accidentally creating regulatory headaches? I help developers and startups navigate the legal side of fintech without the usual lawyer BS. Turns out understanding both your codebase and the compliance requirements is pretty useful. If you want to chat, drop me a line at smitarajmohan@gmail.com