# Cite-Finance API: Launch & Monetization Masterplan 2025
**Mission:** Become the default "Financial Cortex" for AI Agents.
**Core Value:** Stop AI hallucinations in finance. Provide "Compliance-Grade Provenance."
---
## 🏗️ Phase 1: The "Trojan Horse" Strategy (Technical Distribution)
Developers don't want to integrate another REST API. They want to drop a "Tool" into their Agent. We will meet them where they live.
### 1. Build an MCP Server (Model Context Protocol)
* **Why:** Anthropic's new standard (MCP) allows Claude Desktop and other agents to connect to local/remote tools instantly.
* **Action:** Wrap `cite-finance-api` as an MCP server.
* **Result:** Users can type `@cite-finance get apple revenue` directly in Claude Desktop.
* **Monetization:** Free tier for local/personal use, Paid API key for production deployment.
### 2. The Official LangChain/LangGraph Tool
* **Why:** 80% of AI developers use LangChain.
* **Action:** Submit a PR to `langchain-community` with `Cite-FinanceTool`.
* **Pitch:** "The first financial tool that returns *citations* to prevent hallucinations."
### 3. The "LLM-Ready" SDK
* **Current:** `response = requests.get(...)`
* **New SDK:**
```python
from cite-finance import Cite-Finance
fs = Cite-Finance(api_key="...")
# Returns string formatted for GPT-4 system prompt
context = fs.get_context("AAPL", ["financials", "sentiment"])
```
---
## 📢 Phase 2: The "Hallucination" Marketing Campaign
Position Cite-Finance not as a "Data Provider" (boring), but as a "Safety Layer" (critical).
### 1. The "Hall of Shame" Landing Page
* **Concept:** A simple page showing side-by-side comparisons.
* **Left (GPT-4 Raw):** "AAPL Revenue: $400B" (No citation, potentially wrong).
* **Right (Cite-Finance):** "AAPL Revenue: $383.2B [Source: 10-K, Pg 42]" (Verified).
* **Headline:** "Your AI Agent is lying to your users. Fix it with Cite-Finance."
### 2. Reddit "Engineering Porn" Posts
* **Subreddits:** `r/LocalLLaMA`, `r/AI_Agents`, `r/algotrading`.
* **Angle:** "I got tired of my trading bot hallucinating PE ratios, so I built a retrieval engine that cross-validates 3 data sources."
* **Don't sell:** Share the *architecture* (the Insights Engine logic). The API is just the hosted version.
---
## 💰 Phase 3: Pricing & Monetization (The Wedge)
**Pricing Model:** "Usage + Feature Gating"
| Tier | Price | The Hook | Target Audience |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| **Hobby** | **$0** | 50 calls/mo | **MCP Server Users** (Personal use in Claude) |
| **Starter** | **$49/mo** | **Sentiment + Citations** | **Chatbot Builders** (Need "Why", not just "What") |
| **Pro** | **$199/mo** | **Technicals + Real-time** | **Algo Traders** (Need Speed + Accuracy) |
| **Scale** | **$599+** | **Compliance** | **Fintechs** (Need to prove data source to regulators) |
### The "Indie" Wedge ($49/mo)
* Target: Developers building "Financial Advisors" on OpenAI's GPT Store.
* Pain: They can't access real-time news sentiment easily.
* Solution: You offer it for $49/mo (cheaper than building a scraper).
### The "Enterprise" Wedge ($599/mo)
* Target: Fintechs building internal research bots.
* Pain: "We can't use LLMs because they hallucinate numbers."
* Solution: "Cite-Finance offers Compliance-Grade Provenance. Every number is linked to a specific row in an SEC filing."
---
## 🗓️ 4-Week Execution Roadmap
### Week 1: Validation & Packaging
- [ ] Deploy `cite-finance-api` to production (Heroku/Railway).
- [ ] Create a simple landing page (Waitlist/Beta).
- [ ] **Crucial:** Build the `cite-finance-mcp` wrapper (Model Context Protocol).
### Week 2: Directory Blitz
- [ ] Launch on **Product Hunt** (Tag: Developer Tools, Fintech, AI).
- [ ] Submit to **Futurepedia**, **There's An AI For That**.
- [ ] Submit to **LangChain Integrations**.
### Week 3: Content Offensive
- [ ] Blog Post: "Building a Warren Buffet Bot in 10 minutes with Cite-Finance + LangGraph".
- [ ] Tweet thread: "How we verified 10,000 financial data points to stop AI hallucinations."
### Week 4: Cold Outreach
- [ ] Find GitHub repos with "stock trading bot" or "financial agent".
- [ ] Open Issues/PRs: "Hey, saw you're scraping Yahoo Finance. This API might save you 500 lines of code and gives you sentiment analysis."
---
## 🛑 Risks & Mitigation
1. **"I can just scrape Yahoo Finance."**
* *Counter:* Yahoo blocks scrapers, has no sentiment, and no citations. Cite-Finance is for *production* reliability.
2. **"Polygon is better."**
* *Counter:* Polygon gives *data*. Cite-Finance gives *insights*. Polygon costs $200/mo for real-time. We give sentiment + insights for $49.
3. **"LLMs will just browse the web."**
* *Counter:* Browsing is slow (10s+) and flaky. Cite-Finance is <300ms and structured.
**Verdict:** The market is hungry for *reliable, cited* context. You are building the "Citation Layer" for Financial AI.
