Ishwar Sirvi

Publishing an open dataset on GitHub is easy. Getting developers to use it is a different problem. Here is what I learned shipping ReceiptEdit's 2026 US sales tax dataset as a free REST API.

1. No auth. No sign-up. Ever.

Every API-key ceremony is a step where trial users bounce. The dataset is public. https://receiptedit.com/api/sales-tax/california — that is the entire contract.

2. Match the data shape to how it will actually be consumed

90% of consumers ask "What's the sales tax for X state?" So the top-level endpoint is /api/sales-tax/:state — one state per response. When someone needs all 50 for analysis, the CSV/JSON files sit next to the API at github.com/receiptedit/us-sales-tax-2026.

3. CORS on. Cache long. 

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400, s-maxage=604800

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4. Ship an embed alongside the API 

<iframe src="https://receiptedit.com/api/embed/sales-tax/california" width="380" height="540" style="border:0" loading="lazy"></iframe>

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Bloggers on Medium/WordPress cannot install an npm package. They can paste an iframe.

5. License permissively

Real MIT. Attribution appreciated, never required.

Try it

Happy to talk API-design tradeoffs in comments.