BigMint

A data-first platform for commodity market intelligence

A commodity market-intelligence platform that runs a subscription price-reporting business and a newsroom together. Hundreds of price assessments are kept as time-series that can be checked, shown only to the right subscribers, and delivered on web, REST API, Excel plugin and mobile.

Client: BigMint
Industry: Commodity Intelligence
Location: India
Duration: 24 weeks
Published: May 2020
Updated: Oct 2026

Visit bigmint.co

Laravel

Platform

800+

Price assessments published

40+

Countries covered

Web, API, plugin, mobile

Delivery channels from one source

The challenge

BigMint is a commodity market-intelligence platform for the metals, mining and broader commodities world — price assessments, indices, futures data, news and research, statistics, tenders and events. It publishes about 800+ price assessments across 40+ countries, covering ferrous, non-ferrous, energy, agriculture and more. A platform like this is not a website with articles. It is a data product with a website on the front.

Why this is a hard content platform

Price data is the product, and it is time-series. Spot assessments, indices and past series are structured data that changes often, not text. They have to be stored, versioned, charted and delivered. People trust them only if they are right and can be traced (the assessments are described as IOSCO-audited).
Access is tiered. A commodity-intelligence business runs on subscriptions and access rights. Some content is open, but much of it is locked by what each subscriber has paid for. The platform has to enforce that line the same way across web, API and exports.
Delivery is multi-channel. The same data is used on the website, through an API, through an Excel plugin, and on mobile. One source of truth has to feed several very different users.
Breadth is enormous. Dozens of commodity families, dozens of countries, and many content types (prices, news, reports, data, tenders, events) all sit together and link to each other.

The main challenge is running a subscription data business and a newsroom on one platform, where price series, research, news and events are all equally important and each is shown only to the right subscribers.

What we built

We treat BigMint as what it is: a data platform first, a publisher second. We build the web experience on top of a well-planned data core, not the other way round.

Prices as structured time-series, not articles

Assessments and indices are built as core time-series: a commodity, a market or place, a unit, a time and a value, with history kept. That is what makes the data easy to chart, compare across periods and export. For an audited price-reporting agency it also means every number can be traced back to a specific published assessment and is never overwritten.

Entitlements as a cross-cutting concern

Subscription access is controlled in one place, so the same access rules apply whether a user opens a web page, calls the API, or pulls data through the Excel plugin. Building this once, in the platform core, is the only way a multi-channel data business stays consistent. You cannot build "who is allowed to see this price" in three places and expect them to agree.

One source of truth, many delivery surfaces

The website, a REST API, the spreadsheet plugin and the mobile app all read from the same controlled data. Heavy work, such as indexing, totals, making exports and dashboard queries, is moved to background queues and caching. So a burst of traffic or a large export never slows the reading that subscribers depend on.

An editorial engine beside the data engine

News, research reports, statistics, tenders and events are managed as their own content types beside the price data, linked to the commodities they cover. On a Laravel + relational + Redis base, the newsroom and the data product share one platform instead of fighting over two.

The outcome

The result is a single platform that runs a subscription price-reporting business and a commodities newsroom together. Data, research, news, tenders and events are shown only to the right subscribers and delivered on web, API, plugin and mobile.

What the platform carries

Hundreds of price assessments and indices across many commodity families and places, stored as time-series that can be charted, compared and exported.
Multi-channel delivery from one source: website, REST API, Excel plugin and mobile all reading the same controlled data under the same access rules.
A full editorial estate: news, research reports, statistics, tenders and events, linked to the commodities they cover.

Why the data-first architecture is the whole game

For a market-intelligence provider, two things decide whether the business works. The data must be correct and traceable, and access must exactly match what each subscriber has paid for. Keeping prices as time-series that can be checked, and controlling access in one place, delivers both. It also lets the same data safely appear in an API response, a spreadsheet cell and a web chart without three different answers.

Because the platform is built on one controlled core, adding a commodity, a country, a content type or a new delivery channel extends the existing system and does not need a separate build. That is exactly what a platform tracking a growing set of 800+ assessments needs in order to keep growing.

Under the hood