Consumer Financial Pain Explorer
Pick a financial product. See which companies get the most complaints, what the top issues are, how companies respond, and whether complaints are rising or falling.
What this proves
Public complaint databases expose real consumer pain patterns that most people never see. Turning government data into a searchable, visual tool takes hours, not months.
How it works
The Problem Nobody Talks About
Every time a consumer files a complaint about a financial product, that complaint goes into a federal database. The CFPB Consumer Complaint Database now holds millions of records, updated daily. It is fully public.
Almost nobody uses it.
The database exists, but the interface is a government search form. No aggregation. No visual patterns. No way to quickly see: "If I'm about to get a credit card from Chase, what do existing customers actually complain about?"
What I Built
A product-first complaint explorer. You pick a financial product category (credit cards, mortgages, student loans, debt collection) and the tool immediately shows:
- Top companies by complaint volume in that category
- Most common issues consumers report
- How companies respond (monetary relief vs. explanation vs. closed)
- Geographic concentration of complaints by state
- Year-over-year trend showing whether complaints are rising or falling
All data comes live from the CFPB API. No static snapshots, no stale data.
Why Category-First
The obvious interface would be "search by company." But that assumes the user already knows who they're dealing with. The more useful question is: "What's the landscape of pain for this type of financial product?"
Starting with the product category surfaces the companies with the most complaints. That is the comparison most consumers actually need, but never get to see, because the raw data is too hard to navigate.
The Technical Pattern
The architecture is the same one that drives every ShipWithTez build: a Next.js API route proxies the external data source (CFPB's Elasticsearch-backed API), applies server-side caching (1 hour TTL since complaints update daily), and serves pre-aggregated results to a client component that renders pure CSS bar charts.
No charting library. No database. No auth. The entire interactive tool is one API route and one React component.
What This Proves
Government public data is an untapped goldmine for building useful tools. The CFPB database has been public for years, but the default interface buries the patterns. A few hours of work turns it into something a normal person would actually use. That gap between "data exists" and "data is accessible" is where builders create value.
Get the next build and workflow breakdown.