Price Pipeline Health — transparency you can see (and trust)

JSON-based Investment Tracker

Ask your finance app today: Where do your live prices come from, how fresh are they, and what happens when a provider is down?
Pocket Portfolio is setting a precedent: never 0.00 and always show provenance.

Context

Price data is only useful if you can trust it. Pocket Portfolio already runs a time-boxed, multi-provider quote engine (Yahoo Finance Quote, Yahoo Chart, Stooq). We fetch in parallel, the first valid response wins, and if everyone times out we serve last-known good marked as stale.

Until now, that reliability was largely invisible. Users (and support) couldn’t instantly tell which provider answered, how fresh the quote was, or whether we were on a fallback. The Price Pipeline Health widget changes that with a small, honest panel on your dashboard.

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What's new

• Provider status at a glance. Each provider shows a badge — Fresh (green), Fallback (amber), Unhealthy (red) — plus a timestamp.
• Self-healing snapshot. If the cached snapshot is stale, the edge endpoint performs lightweight probes (no heavy parsing) to refresh state responsibly.
• Edge-friendly & optional Redis. Works in memory for local/dev; persists across regions with Upstash Redis in production.
• Accessible by design. Colour is never the only cue; badges include text + aria-live="polite" updates.

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How it works (high-level)

1. Record & store health. Each provider call in our quote path records success/failure with timestamps and whether a fallback was used. Storage is Redis (if configured) or in-memory per edge process.
2. Serve a small contract. GET /api/health-price returns:

{
  "providers": [
    { "provider": "yahoo", "lastSuccess": 1730000000000, "lastFailure": null, "failureCount": 0, "activeFallback": false },
    { "provider": "chart", "lastSuccess": 1730000000000, "lastFailure": null, "failureCount": 1, "activeFallback": true },
    { "provider": "stooq", "lastSuccess": null, "lastFailure": 1730000000000, "failureCount": 4, "activeFallback": false }
  ]
}

It's CDN-friendly (s-maxage=5) and never blocks the dashboard.

3. Classify on the client. The UI applies documented rules:

• Fresh: last success < 30s
• Fallback: active fallback or last failure < 60s
• Unhealthy: no success ≥ 5 min

4. Render the card. A tiny component maps providers → RAG badges and shows “Updated HH:MM:SS” in your locale/time-zone.

Diagram (words): Providers (Yahoo/Chart/Stooq) → Parallel quote engine (1.5s budget) → Shared health store (lastSuccess/lastFailure/failureCount/activeFallback) → /api/health-price → Dashboard card with Fresh/Fallback/Unhealthy badges.

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Impact on users

• Confidence, not guesswork. Know immediately if your quotes are live or on fallback, and whether a provider is having a bad day.
• Support with receipts. Provenance reduces back-and-forth (“was this cached?”) and speeds incident triage.
• Integrity by default. We never mask outages; we label them, keep the app responsive, and recover gracefully.

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How to contribute / try it today

We built this to be easy to audit and extend.

Try it locally

1. Start the app and visit the dashboard — the Price Pipeline Health card renders automatically.

2. Call the endpoint directly:

   curl -sS http://localhost:3000/api/health-price | jq .
   

3. (Optional) Test vendor reachability:

   curl -sS http://localhost:3000/api/yahoo-smoke | jq .
   

Configure persistence (production)

Set these env vars and redeploy:

UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=...
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN=...

No code changes needed; the store switches from in-memory → Redis.

Open-source collaboration

• UX: propose badge copy/contrast improvements or a compact mobile layout.
• Providers: PR an adapter + probe for another data source (the contract is tiny).
• Docs: help explain the why — especially for regulated audiences — with examples and screenshots.

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Why this matters (and a friendly challenge)

Real-time finance should be observable. If your provider can’t tell you source • age • status for every price, ask them why not. We’re sharing our approach so health becomes a boring, industry-wide default — not a hidden detail.

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Appendix: implementation notes

• UI shell: /app/index.html card container with aria-live="polite".
• Styles: token-based badges (green/amber/red) in /app/style.css.
• Health store: Redis|memory module in /api/_health.js.
• Endpoint: /api/health-price probes vendors when stale, then returns the snapshot.
• Diagnostics: /api/yahoo-smoke prints RTT + samples for debugging.
• Routing: All endpoints run on the Edge runtime (Vercel).
• Guardrails: no client secrets; small cache window; probes are lightweight.

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Credits

Thanks to our early testers and everyone filing issues. Shout-out to @22s for the probe design, and the Open-fintech-builders group on CoderLegion for chaos-testing on spotty networks.

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Key Takeaways

Unlike cloud apps, Pocket Portfolio uses Sovereign Sync to turn your Google Drive into a database. This approach ensures:

• Data Ownership: Your financial data lives in your Google Drive, not a vendor's database
• No Vendor Lock-in: Export anytime, use any tool
• Privacy by Default: Your data never leaves your control
• Local-First Resilience: Works offline, syncs when online

Learn how to set up Google Drive Sync and turn your Drive into your personal financial database.

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