Migration Guide
Your app broke when OpenSecrets killed their API. Here is the fix.
OpenSecrets discontinued their public API in April 2025. If your app, dashboard, or research pipeline depended on it, you are looking for a replacement. This is it — live, free to start, and covering more data than OpenSecrets ever exposed via API.
What happened
OpenSecrets (opensecrets.org) shut down their public API in April 2025 following staff layoffs and funding cuts. Existing API keys stopped working. There is no official migration path. This page is the unofficial one.
Migrate in 4 steps
1 · Get a free API key
No credit card. 1,000 calls/month on the free tier — migrate against the whole catalog at shallow depth before choosing a pack.
2 · Map your endpoints
Candidates, committees, and finance aggregates map to the ATCSTW Politics Pack endpoints; the concept mapping is in the documentation. Where ATCSTW's resolved-entity model differs from the legacy ID model, the docs say so at the endpoint.
3 · Update authentication
Replace the OpenSecrets API key parameter with an X-API-Key header (or ?api_key= query parameter):
"https://api.atcstw.com/v1/donations/summary?candidate_id=H8CA12345&cycle=2024"
4 · Adjust donor-data logic
One important difference, stated up front: ATCSTW returns organization-level, geographic, and candidate-level aggregates — not individual donor records. Federal law (§30111(a)(4)) restricts contributor data, and no tier of this API serves individual contributor names or addresses. If your use case required them, it is better to know in step 4 than in a footnote.
What you gain
A provenance stamp on every response (source · period · retrieval date). Coverage OpenSecrets never exposed via API — corporate violations, OSHA and wage theft, private-equity ownership, patents. Published pricing. A public corrections log and a freshness page that says when a dataset is late. Migration questions: data@atcstw.com — a named human answers migration mail during the launch window.