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Show HN: WARN Firehose – Every US layoff notice in one searchable database (warnfirehose.com)

134 points by sendkamal ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I built WARN Firehose because I was frustrated trying to track layoff data across the US. The WARN Act requires companies with 100+ employees to file public notices 60 days before mass layoffs — but the data is scattered across 50 state websites with different formats, broken links, and no API.

WARN Firehose scrapes every state workforce agency daily and normalizes the data into a single database going back to 1988. It now has 131,000+ notices covering 14 million workers.

*What you can do:*

- Browse interactive charts and data tables (no account needed): https://warnfirehose.com/data - Drill into any state, city, company, or industry: https://warnfirehose.com/data/layoffs - Query the REST API (free tier: 100 calls/day): https://warnfirehose.com/docs - Export in CSV, JSON, NDJSON, Parquet, or JSON-LD - Set up webhooks for real-time alerts on new filings

*Who uses this:*

- Journalists breaking layoff stories before press releases - Quant funds using WARN filings as an alternative data signal (filings happen ~60 days before layoffs) - Recruiters sourcing from displaced talent pools - Researchers studying labor market dynamics - Workforce development boards doing rapid response planning

*Tech stack:* Python/FastAPI, SQLite, scrapers for all 50 states, static HTML generation for SEO pages, Claude Haiku for AI analysis, deployed on EC2.

Free tier is genuinely useful (100 API calls/day, dashboard access, charts). Paid plans start at $19/mo for full historical data and bulk exports.

Would love feedback on the API design, data quality, or anything else. Happy to answer questions.

19 comments

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tgrowazay
Now we need a usable website that uses this API to show latest layoffs in, for example, CA.
nebula8804
Great site thank you. Just curious, I looked up my company(more than 40k employees across the world including many US states) and it seems like I am not seeing the layoffs that colleagues have experienced. This is probably expected as im probably missing some criteria. Do all layoffs have to have a WARN notice or are there mechanisms/criteria that allow companies to lay people off without filing these noticies?
sendkamal
I am agreeing with two comments. There might be many reasons. Just the fact that there are only 12M records in last 30 years or so for all 50 states it definitely doesn't represent all data - may be 10%
cobertos
Interesting, though a lot of the UI seems broken. For my state I see some notice dates in the future (it's not explained why, if this is when the filing will be executed or if it's an incorrect filing date, as the column is just "Notice Date")

Some of the entries pull up a page that says "Failed to load company data: No company name provided in URL" from the state specific view (e.g, any link on https://warnfirehose.com/data/layoffs/california ). Has a vibe-coded feel to it.

I saw a lot of "Purchase dataset for city details" in places which was annoying. Wondering how much processing is being done on the base dataset to justify the pricing. Could you explain a bit on the normalization/cleaning process?

sendkamal
@cobertos The UI things should have been addressed. However I did to an extensive testing myself and everything seemed to have worked for me. I am sold that vibe coding is a thing, seriously. To your question about normalization cleaning - I have gone through multiple iterations - the data is definitely not clean and all. However, claude has made a function (instead of cleaning them on demand, it has a function which gets updated with every pattern so it could be reused).

For the pricing, to be honest I have zero hope to make money. Its just out there because I wanted to integrate this with stripe for payments and all. At the same time, if you look at competitor sites, they seem crap lol. plus look at their pricing. The site does have some operating cost and I will have to recover them if i can if I want it to be self sustainable but only if this is a value to someone. I am trying to make this a value. Please offer if you have ideas and I would appreciated it :)

[dead] vicchenai
[dead]
sendkamal
This is great insights @vicchenai. I just made it in a whim. I asked Gemini for suggestions and it presented few and I picked this one because there didn't seem to be good players out there. There is layoffdata and warntracker and all but they were built using hand coding :) it probably took them quite long to have it done. This is a challenging thing - 50 states having different data formats and having to poll them daily. Data cleaning is another thing. Historical data is also a thing. Plus all the blogs, reports, data presentation and api endpoints.

If it all can be done in a weekend without having to write a single line manually, sky is the limit no? Anybody having an idea can make these thing happen. I am not expecting it to make any money and it was a learning project but I do see some value for certain people.

Insurance brokers would benefit if they are first to know so they coudl target these layed off people. Recruiters the same and definitely hedge funds, short shellers and quant. Gemini tells me data is the new oil ! I am convinced.

LowLevelKernel
How do I filter by Company Name?
sendkamal
you should just be able to go to data -> all records -> type company name.

By the way, if the company is public, it brings up stock ticker, SEC link and all layoff related news. Plus all historical WARN notices by that company.

malshe
This dataset looks interesting but the site doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in data integrity.

On the Charts page the selected time range is 12/01/2025 to 02/28/2026 and shows 106,603 employees affected. But the horizontal bar chart with state level data shows numbers in millions. For example, CA has more than 2 million and IL has more than 1.7 million employees affected. Then the layoff map at the bottom shows only layoffs in Texas.

sendkamal
Thank you @malshe. I will review and get it addressed. The site is not perfect at all and I will address them.
sendkamal
Thank you for checking the work and all the comments which are very very valuable. Site does quite a lot to be honest so please take some time to explore more :)

- It has over 15k individual landing pages for search engines - a dedicated page for each city, state, company, county. These pages are very reach on how they look haha: - Exmaple: new jersey page-> https://warnfirehose.com/data/layoffs/new-jersey - Data is exportable to multiple format including json-d and parquet - i never heard of parquet before. - The site has MCP (model context protocol) built in ! - it accepts payments on multiple methods including paypal, apple pay, amazon pay, card etc. All refund and all built in. - It also has an invisible admin dashboard where I can see everything (all metrics, signups payments etc.) - Reports are crazy - these are genuinely better than someone writing at wallstreet journal, seriously. you would have to check to see them. - The api endpoints.

I am convinced the role Software engineer is going to go away by this year end. We are turning into builders, not coders. All SaaS apps are going to take big hit because they can be builkt better for fraction of cost by anyone - just think about it.

- Its all about ideas and anyone can do it.