Free forever. No auth. No usage limits worth worrying about.

Build on 23,371 real problems

PainSignal listens to how people across every industry describe what is broken about their work — the plumber fighting a scheduling tool, the office manager chasing patient reminders — and turns it into a structured, queryable corpus. This page is everything you need to consume it programmatically.

Problems: 23,371
Opportunities: 11,033
Industries: 87
Categories: 415

Try it right now

No signup, no key, no preamble. Paste this into a terminal.

curl -s 'https://painsignal.net/api/v1/signals?industry=Plumbing&min_severity=4&limit=3' \
  | jq '.data[] | {problem: .painStatement, idea: .solutionTitle}'

Every response is { data, meta, error }. On success error is null; on failure data is null.

Six ways in

REST API

Eleven public GET endpoints over problems, opportunities, taxonomy and analytics. Standard JSON envelope, cursor-free pagination, no authentication.

Read the reference

MCP server

Point Claude, Cursor or any MCP client at PainSignal and let it search the corpus directly. Stateless streamable-HTTP, read-only, no key needed.

Connect a client

Bulk export

Stream the whole corpus as CSV or JSONL and analyse it offline. Filter by industry, category or severity before you pull.

Export the data

Feeds

RSS and JSON Feed for new opportunities, sliced per industry or category. Wire new problems straight into your reader or your build queue.

Market analytics

Where the pain concentrates: industry league tables, willingness-to-pay economics, and report volume back to 2015 on the reported-at axis.

Open the dashboard

Tool Gap Index

The incumbent tools people name when describing what is failing them — 10,339 problems name one. Start where an incumbent already lost the room.

Browse incumbents

Tools built on top

Spec builder

Turn any opportunity into a build-ready technical spec — user stories, data model, API surface, suggested stack and a phased MVP cut. Copy it straight into your coding agent.

Skill match

Describe what you can build and what you know. Get the opportunities that actually fit, ranked by semantic similarity rather than by keyword.

Rate limits and optional keys

Everything works with no key at all. A free API key exists only to raise your limits and lift the row cap on bulk export — it does not unlock any data. If you ever find something reachable only with a key, that is a bug.

Endpoint class	Anonymous	With a key
Reads and analytics	60 / min	600 / min
Semantic search	10 / min	60 / min
Bulk export	5 / hour, 1,000 rows	60 / hour, 50,000 rows

curl -s 'https://painsignal.net/api/v1/export?type=problems&format=jsonl' \
  -H 'X-API-Key: ps_live_…'

Get a free key

If you are an agent

Every page on this site has a markdown twin: append .md to any path, or send Accept: text/markdown. Token count is advertised in the X-Markdown-Tokens response header.

Using the data

Free to use, including commercially. Attribution is appreciated but not demanded — a link back to painsignal.net is enough. Please do not re-publish the corpus wholesale as a competing index. See the terms, and get in touch if you are building something big on this — higher limits are available for the asking.