Donation.watch
open-source political finance tracker (AGPL/CC-BY)
Details
- External ID
- 47046414
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Donation.watch
- Website domain
- donation.watch
- Launched
- Feb. 17, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4393530997304582
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- algorithmic trading bots and platforms
- Vertical
- Government
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- political donation tracker
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The web frontend and visualizations are simple to build, but aggregating, cleaning, and continuously syncing standardized political finance registries across 19 countries requires extensive data pipeline engineering.
What it would actually take: The system requires a distributed ingestion engine (Python/Airflow/Prefect) running specialized extractors for disparate government registries, PDFs, and bespoke public databases across 19 nations. Hard parts involve entity resolution (mapping varying corporate and donor identities across borders and foreign language character sets) and maintaining data consistency. Extensive manual data curation and ETL maintenance are required to keep international campaign finance data reliable.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Astro, banipartide.ro, finantarepartide.ro
Concerns raised: Next.js unnecessary for static content, should be HTML with minimal JS, US dataset too large, needs filtering strategy, Data sources unresponsive to integration requests, Government datasets have encoding issues and missing files
Feature requests: Add US political donation dataset
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 93 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #57 of 94 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 106 days after the earliest competitor.
- crypto-tax-calculator · github · 2026-09-20 · 377 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- BountyWatch · github · 2026-09-24 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Yallby-Agent · github · 2026-09-20 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- open-banking-financial-insights · github · 2026-09-24 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Finly · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- stampede · github · 2026-09-11 · 150 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- redaction-tools · github · 2026-09-17 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Fed10 🇺🇸 – AI Lobbyists · yc · 2026-03-06 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.