Design Goals

RESERVE is an unofficial, command-line interface for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED® Application Programming Interface (API). The program was designed and written with the following goals in mind:

Consider all users first class citizens including humans, other programs, and large language model based agents
Minimize barriers to entry to the FRED ecosystem including financial and economics or technical knowledge
Create a single cross-platform, binary application with ZERO dependencies including database software, run-time environments, or external packages.
Support users on Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple silicon), Linux, and ARM based platforms (Raspberry Pi, Microsoft Surface, etc)
Embrace two high-level use cases:
Provide a consistent wrapper for 100% of FRED API’s data functionality
Enable pipeline and transformation capabilities to support automation and artificial intelligence work streams
Support a wide variety of users ranging from students and enthusiasts to enterprise analysts and IT departments
Push “deterministic results” as far right as possible in AI use cases.

Democratization of Economic Data

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has made macroeconomic data broadly accessible through the FRED® platform. However, access alone does not guarantee usability. Whether using the FRED web interface, its free API, or third-party tools, users must still know what to look for and how to retrieve it.

RESERVE reduces this barrier by simplifying how economic data is accessed, explored, and analyzed. It runs on everything from high-performance servers to low-cost devices like a $35 Raspberry Pi, making powerful data tooling widely available. In addition, RESERVE provides structured onboarding for large language models, enabling users to explore economic concepts through AI and leverage intelligent agents to assist in data discovery and analysis.

This combination of accessibility, portability, and AI integration represents a deeper form of democratization—one that not only opens access to data, but also empowers more people to understand and use it.

Technical Details

Reserve was written in Go and compiled under version 1.25.7 of the Go language toolset. It was built using an object command model and leverages a number of core Go strengths including rate-limiting back off routines, concurrency, and strict data type enforcement. All pipeline and transformation features that require local storage or caching of data do so so through an embedded database mechanism that is created, operated, and managed by the RESERVE binary itself.

Go is known for simplicity, high-performance, and portability and has seen significant adoption in data processing and pipeline environments.

Requirements

RESERVE was created and is maintained under an MIT license–it is free to download, use, and evolve. There are two main requirements for RESERVE. First, a FREE API key for the FRED API; second a computer that supports a shell that can run a command-line interface. This site has detailed instructions on downloading, configuring, and running RESERVE on a number of popular computer environments.

Disclaimers

This project is not officially supported nor endorsed by The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Moreover, it is not certified nor endorsed by the FRED platform. RESERVE’s creators and contributors are not associated nor work for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis nor any Federal Reserve Bank subsidiary.

In using RESERVE, you the user accept all responsibility for implementing and testing its implementation.

The Designer & Creator

RESERVE was designed and created by career technology leader and programmer Derick Schaefer. As a long-time consumer of economic and financial data, his goal was simple:

Simplify macro-economic data access for all.

RESERVE is free to use and released under the permissive MIT license. It is a personal project, and Derick does not accept donations or sponsorships for its development. Instead, he invites command-line enthusiasts to explore his work further through his 2025 book, CLI: A Practical Guide for Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, or to consider purchasing a copy and donating it to an educational program in their community.