The problem
Ukrainian spot grain prices change during the day, but official reports are weekly and coarse, and legacy data providers charge thousands per year. A trader needs to see the margin between an inland elevator and a port in seconds.
What we built
- An automated pipeline that extracts structured prices with an AI parser, normalises crops and locations and computes freight and margins
- Updates every 30 minutes during trading peaks
- A public website with live prices, charts and margins
- A REST API with key-based access: prices in JSON or CSV with filters, fertilizers, freight, margins and interactive docs
- An auto-generated SEO blog in English and Ukrainian, about 1,700 pages
- A Telegram bot with per-crop prices, a freight and margin calculator, alerts, a daily briefing and a four-tier subscription paid in Telegram Stars
How it's built
No servers. A scheduled job does the collecting and AI parsing, then publishes fresh data; Cloudflare serves the site, the API and the bot worldwide. Payments go through Telegram's own Stars system, so there was no card processor to integrate.