← Blog · 2026-05-15
Why I built eolas
I keep needing New Zealand official data. CPI, house prices, SA2 boundaries, exchange rates, council hazard layers. Every time, the same dance: find the portal, find the right table, download something slightly wrong, clean the dates, check whether I’m allowed to put it in a client report.
Stats NZ is one place. RBNZ is another. LINZ another. Each council has its own ArcGIS hub. Treasury likes spreadsheets. GeoNet is a feed. None of that is anyone’s fault — agencies publish for their own jobs — but if your job is analysis across sources, you pay the tax every week.
eolas is my answer to that tax. One API, one set of clients, licences recorded on every table.
There’s about 1,500 datasets live now from Stats NZ, RBNZ, Treasury, MBIE, LINZ, NZTA, ACC, PHARMAC, MSD, Education Counts, regional councils, and more. Numbers move; the catalogue is the truth: eolas.fyi/datasets.
What using it looks like
from eolas_data import Client
client = Client("your_api_key")
cpi = client.get("nz_cpi") # OECD — annual CPI % change
rates = client.get("rbnz_b2_wholesale_rates_monthly")
That’s two agencies, two tidy frames, dates already usable. Same idea in R (eolas) and via the CLI if you want CSV or Parquet on disk.
I care a lot about the boring bit: licence. We read the copyright statement for each source and store it with the table. Most NZ government stats are CC-BY 4.0 and fine for commercial use; some aren’t (OECD is query-only on eolas for redistribution reasons). If you’ve ever half-remembered “I think this is open?” — I wrote that up properly in The state of open data in New Zealand (2026).
Who this is for
Anyone who needs NZ official data and doesn’t want to maintain a private zoo of scrapers. If you’ve written a one-off Stats NZ script, then written it again when the URL changed — that’s the job eolas does once and keeps doing when agencies redesign their sites.
There’s a free tier (no card) so you can try it on a real piece of work. Pro lifts the caps. Enterprise is for teams that want a Snowflake share, unlimited API, and someone to talk to when procurement shows up.
I’m Phil. eolas is a small product on purpose. If something’s missing from the catalogue, tell me — it grows from what people actually ask for.