# 🆓 Free Testing Quick Reference

## TL;DR: You can test everything for $0

### Already Working (PR1 ✅)
- **Price data**: `yfinance` (free, unlimited)
- **Unit tests**: Mocked data in `tests/` (15 passing tests)
- **Coverage**: 87% without any paid APIs

### For PR2 (Congressional Trades) - FREE Options

#### Best Option: House Stock Watcher 🌟
```bash
# No API key needed, just scrape their public JSON
curl https://housestockwatcher.com/api/all_transactions
```
- **Cost**: $0
- **Rate limit**: None (reasonable scraping)
- **Data**: Live congressional trades (House + Senate)
- **Quality**: Community-maintained, very reliable

#### Backup: Quiver Quantitative Free Tier
```bash
# Sign up for free at quiverquant.com
# Add to .env:
QUIVERQUANT_API_KEY=your_free_key
```
- **Cost**: $0
- **Rate limit**: 500 API calls/month (enough for testing)
- **Data**: Congress + Senate trades + insider trades

### Testing Strategy (Zero Cost)

```bash
# 1. Unit tests (always free, use mocks)
make test

# 2. Integration tests with fixtures (real data shape, no network)
pytest tests/ -m integration

# 3. Live smoke test with free APIs
python scripts/fetch_house_watcher_sample.py  # We'll build this in PR2
```

### What You DON'T Need to Pay For

❌ QuiverQuant Pro ($30/mo) - free tier is enough for dev/testing  
❌ Financial Modeling Prep paid tier - free tier works  
❌ Any paid database hosting - SQLite works great locally  
❌ Any cloud services - runs 100% locally

### When You MIGHT Want Paid (Way Later)

- Production-grade rate limits (thousands of requests/day)
- Historical data >2 years back
- Multiple concurrent users on a dashboard
- Commercial use (check each API's terms)

**For personal research? Stay free forever. 🎉**

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See `docs/06_free_testing_data.md` for full details.