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FactIQ exists so analysts can spend less time buried in data portals

You probably didn’t wake up today thinking "Ooh, I’d love to spend 90 minutes wrestling with BLS series IDs!"

But if you’re a journalist, analyst, or policy person, that’s often what “finding data” actually means.

You have questions and just want answers. How have median wages for teachers changed in the last decade?, How is China's electricity portfolio evolving?, What's happening to employment in my city?.

But instead, you end up juggling five government portals, guessing which of 20 similar looking series is the "right one", and spending grunt work trying to assemble and visualize data.

Working with public economic data is hard

If you work with U.S. economic data, you already know the issues:

  • Fragmented sources: Labour stats here, GDP there, industry detail somewhere else. Each with its own interface and quirks.

  • Cryptic taxonomies: Series like LNS14000000 or tables like T20804B that only make sense once you’ve memorised the codebook.

  • Time lost to mechanics. Most of your time goes to finding, downloading, and cleaning data instead of reasoning about it.

  • Hard-to-trust screenshots. By the time a chart makes it to Twitter or a slide deck, you often can’t see exactly which series or transformations were used.

This means that smart researchers with important questions spend most of their time wrestling with data portals - instead of actually analyzing data. We want to change that.

Reduce grunt-work, and form connections that lead to real insight

Here's the painful version of what you might do:

  • Stitch together BLS, BEA, and sometimes Fed data

  • Manually check whether series are in nominal vs real terms

  • Re-run the same data pulls every time you revisit a topic

What FactIQ does instead

  • You ask plain-English questions like “real median hourly wage for nurses” or “real GDP growth last 20 years.”

  • FactIQ resolves those into specific series, shows you charts and tables, and lets you normalise and filter (raw values, percentage changes, etc.)

  • It then picks up the most relevant series for answering your questions, combines and analyzes them, and creates a detailed report

Most importantly, FactIQ doesn’t hide the methodology:

  • Every chart points back to the original dataset and series.

  • The app includes methodology notes so you can see how a given metric is defined and collected (for example, unemployment being based on the civilian non-institutional population, measured monthly, seasonally adjusted).

If something looks off, you can sanity-check the reasoning instead of treating the system as a black box.

Look at the charts below and explore for yourself!

What are the prices of eggs, chicken, and beef over the last 5 years?

bls

Updated 30 Nov 2025

Where this is going

FactIQ today is focused on making US economic data searchable in plain English and transparently sourced. In the coming weeks, we will add data from China, India, and the EU as well – and give you a clear viewing glass for the real economy across the world.

And if you’ve ever found yourself buried under a pile of government PDFs thinking, “There has to be a better way to do this,” — that’s exactly the frustration this product was built to solve. Give it a shot!