About eolas

Why we built this

If you've ever needed a Stats NZ time series for a model or a dashboard, you know the routine: figure out which API is the current one (hint: not the one Google sends you to), reverse-engineer the SDMX query format, handle the YYYYMM period quirk, deal with redirects, then write the same boilerplate next time you need a different series.

Every NZ data source has its own version of this — Stats NZ uses SDMX, RBNZ publishes XLSX, NZTA exposes ArcGIS REST, LINZ has its own Koordinates platform, MBIE attaches Excel files to web pages. Each is fine in isolation. Together, they're a tax on every analyst, researcher, and developer who needs NZ data for anything.

eolas.fyi is one REST API that wraps all of them. Pull nz_cpi the same way you pull a Stats NZ Geospatial polygon or an MSD benefit-rate breakdown. JSON in, dataframe out.

Who's behind it

Phil Donovan — principal economist and the developer behind eolas. Day job is consulting via Virtus Solutions, a small economics consultancy based in Wellington, New Zealand.

eolas started as in-house infrastructure for consulting projects — the same datasets kept coming up, the same scraping scripts kept needing maintenance, and clients kept asking "can you just give me the data?" Spinning it into a public API was the natural next step.

How we work

• Open data only. Every dataset we publish is either public-domain or CC-BY licensed by its source. We attribute where attribution is required (see each dataset detail page).
• Weekly refresh. Most pipelines run Wednesday morning NZ time. Older monthly/quarterly sources refresh on their own cadence. The status page shows last successful runs.
• No middleware in the data path. We use AWS Iceberg + Glue + S3 (in Sydney) and a Snowflake share for Enterprise customers. There's no proprietary format — you can read directly from S3 if you want.
• One person, ambient automation. The pipelines are EventBridge-scheduled and failure-alerted. Phil is the only operator, which keeps things simple and honest about who's accountable.

Where the data comes from

We don't generate any of the underlying data — we just make it easier to use. The sources we pull from, alphabetically:

• · ACC
• · Education Counts
• · LINZ
• · MBIE
• · MSD
• · NZ Police / MoJ
• · NZ Treasury
• · OECD
• · RBNZ
• · Stats NZ
• · Waka Kotahi (NZTA)
• · WorkSafe NZ
• · Auckland Council
• · Department of Conservation

Want a source we don't cover yet? Let us know — we add new pipelines roughly fortnightly.

Trust & security

If you're evaluating eolas for a production workload or are doing procurement diligence, our security & trust page covers data lineage, hosting, uptime, and incident response.