Blog

Technical deep dives on health insurance data, API design, and building financial data infrastructure.

api-design database performance

How We Paginate 22,000 Health Plans: Cursor, Offset, and When to Use Each

A technical deep-dive into Opelyx's dual-mode pagination — cursor-based keyset pagination for data pipelines and offset pagination for browsing — with real D1/SQLite numbers, compound cursor encoding, and the honest tradeoffs of each approach.

Mark at Opelyx ·
mcp trading ai-agents

Real-Time Financial Data via MCP: Prediction Markets, SEC EDGAR, and More

How we built a Model Context Protocol server on Cloudflare Workers with Durable Objects to give AI agents structured access to financial data — and what we learned about rate limiting, caching, and the difference between MCP and REST.

Mark at Opelyx ·
health-data data-quality data-engineering

Health Insurance Data Quality: What We Learned Processing 22,000 Plans

Real data quality failures from processing CMS Public Use Files and state exchange data — swapped URL columns, junk brochure links, HIOS ID mismatches, and why we store everything in R2 before touching it.

Mark at Opelyx ·
api-design architecture developer-experience

API Design for Financial Data: Lessons from Building Opelyx

Practical API design decisions from building a financial data API on Cloudflare Workers — covering auth, rate limiting, pagination, and why some conventional wisdom doesn't hold up at scale.

Mark at Opelyx ·
health-data sbc consumer-finance

SBC Data Explained: Making Out-of-Pocket Costs Transparent

Summary of Benefits and Coverage documents contain standardized cost scenarios that reveal what a health plan actually costs beyond the premium. Here's how we extract and use this data.

Mark at Opelyx ·
health-data sbm data-engineering

The State-Based Marketplace Data Challenge

21 states run their own health insurance exchanges and each publishes plan data differently. Here's what we learned building a unified parser that handles all of them.

Mark at Opelyx ·
api-design architecture cloudflare

Building a Health Plan Comparison API: Architecture Decisions

How we built the Opelyx Health Plans API on Cloudflare Workers, D1, and Hono — and why each of those choices was the right one for sub-50ms global response times.

Mark at Opelyx ·
health-data cms data-engineering

How CMS Public Use Files Power Health Plan Data

A technical deep dive into the CMS Public Use Files that underpin ACA marketplace plan data — what they contain, when they're released, and the engineering challenges of processing 1.4 million rate records.

Mark at Opelyx ·
health-data aca technical-guide

Understanding ACA Rating Areas: A Developer's Guide

Rating areas govern how ACA health plan premiums are set by geography. If you're building with health plan data, getting rating area lookup wrong will silently return incorrect prices.

Mark at Opelyx ·
health-data api-design startup

Why We Built Opelyx: Structured Data for Health Insurance

Health insurance data is a mess — fragmented CMS files, inconsistent formats, and API vendors who won't talk to you unless you have a $10K budget. Here's why we built a developer-first alternative.

Mark at Opelyx ·