Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000/year.
I built the same thing for free. Here's how.
The problem
Every trader needs real-time financial news.
But professional terminals cost between $2,000 and $24,000
per year. That's insane for an indie developer or
retail trader.
So I built https://flowfeed.cc/ — a free real-time news terminal
that pulls from 24+ sources simultaneously.
The stack
Frontend: React + TanStack Query
Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL + Edge Functions on Deno)
Builder: Lovable (AI-powered React builder)
Payments: Whop
Analytics: Taap.it
The news pipeline
This was the hardest part to get right.
The feed pulls from two types of sources:
RSS feeds (7 sources)
- CNBC, MarketWatch, Yahoo Finance, Investing.com
- CoinDesk, The Block, ZeroHedge
Telegram channels (9 channels)
Using the public preview endpoint t.me/s/{channel} —
no API key required. Telegram channels like WatcherGuru
and WalterBloomberg often break news 30-60 seconds
before mainstream media.
Each article goes through a pipeline:
Fetch — server-side via Supabase Edge Functions
(avoids CORS issues)
Strip HTML — custom entity decoder handles
double-encoded HTML from ZeroHedge and others
Quality filter — exclusion-only logic,
removes lifestyle/non-financial content
Dedup — URL-based deduplication
(strips UTM params before comparing)
Near-dup — catches same story posted on
both Telegram and RSS within 5 minutes
72h cutoff — Breaking tab shows last 3 days
Auto-refresh — client polls every 30 seconds
with React Query
The pipeline went from returning ~34 articles
to ~250 articles after fixing these stages.
The biggest lesson
The health dashboard showed all sources as "operational"
but the feed was nearly empty. Turned out the 24h
Breaking cutoff was dropping 75% of valid articles.
Always log your pipeline stage by stage:
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