US Debt Wire: Turning a Public Government Dataset Into a Real Tool

US Debt Wire turns the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's public complaint data into an actual usable tool — debt-collector lookups, calculators, and state-by-state hubs. It's live at usdebtwire.com.

CFPB complaint data is public and genuinely useful. It also lives inside a government API that almost nobody will ever touch directly. Turning that raw data into something a real person could actually search — has this collector been complained about, what does that mean in my state — seemed worth more than another generic "know your rights" article, if it could get built fast enough to matter.

It did. A real ingestion pipeline pulls from CFPB's public complaint API into Cloudflare D1 and KV, feeding debt-collector lookups, calculators, and per-state hubs with genuinely live data behind them. Not a static shell dressed up to look like a tool. Empty scaffold to working, deployed data site in three days, with crawler and AI-answer-engine access built in from the start instead of bolted on later.

The actual site breaks into nine real sections: a company/collector lookup ("is this legit?"), situation-based guidance for specific circumstances like a lawsuit or garnishment, a comparison hub for debt-relief options, the state-by-state rules hub covering all 50 states plus DC, a calculators section, company reviews, a glossary, a debt-types reference, and the CFPB complaint lookup tool itself. A wage-garnishment calculator and a Chapter 7 means-test estimator sit alongside the complaint data — the kind of thing that turns a lookup tool into something someone actually bookmarks.

The Fun Part of This One

Less content-marketing instinct, more "dive into a public dataset and see what's actually in there." It's also the fastest build in this whole portfolio, which says something about how far a clear, narrow scope goes when the data source is already doing the hard work for you.

Five Days In

30 of 51 states have real content; the other 21 are stubs — said plainly here because a data tool's credibility depends on not overstating its own coverage. The open questions are whether the CFPB pipeline holds up as an ongoing feed rather than a one-time pull, and whether filling the remaining states is worth the effort once real usage data comes in.

Five days old as of this writing, and Search Console is already picking it up — narrow glossary and lookup terms getting real impressions, a few landing in positions good enough to be worth watching, well before most sites would even be fully crawled. Building the crawler access in from day one looks like it's paying off early; too soon to call it more than that.