Data station
Zapinner
One API that cleans, checks and de-duplicates messy data before it reaches your app.
1. Learn it
- Real data arrives ugly: 'ACME, INC.' and 'Acme Inc' are the same company, '$1.2M' and '1200000' are the same number, and half your signups have a stray space in the email.
- Zapinner is one address you send that mess to, and it hands back tidy, structured data plus a record of everything it changed.
- Three jobs cover most of it: Repair (fix data you already have), Map (bend incoming data into the shape your app expects), Guard (reject bad data at the door).
- Underneath sit smaller tools you can call on their own — normalize, dedupe, match, compare, anomalies, reconcile — around 79 in total.
- It is deterministic: the same input gives the same output every time, so you can write a test against it. That is the difference between this and asking a model to tidy your spreadsheet.
- It also speaks MCP, which means an agent can use it as a tool — the exact pattern the Agent Lab teaches.
Cost: Free 1,000 credits a month; $10/mo for 10,000, $30/mo for 50,000. Most calls cost one credit.
2. Practice it
Simulated — nothing real happensSpot what a cleaner has to decide
Take these two rows — {'Company Name': 'ACME, INC.', 'Email': ' JOHN@ACME.COM '} and {'company': 'Acme Inc', 'email_address': 'john@acme.com'} — and write down three decisions a cleaner must make: which field names match, which values are really the same, and which single row survives.
3. Connect it
Real — your own account- 1Create a free key at zapinner.com — the free plan gives 1,000 credits a month across every capability.
- 2Keys look like zap_test_... or zap_live_... and are shown once, so store the key as a secret, never in your app's code.
- 3Try one call first: POST https://zapinner.com/api/v1/normalize with an Authorization: Bearer header and a small data object.
- 4Read the response before you build on it — you get the original and cleaned value for each field, plus the credits that call used.
- 5Call it from your server, never from the browser, or your key is public.
MessyDev never signs you up, spends your money, or touches your accounts. You do that part.
4. Use it
Anywhere untrusted data enters: CSV imports, signup forms, scraped pages, a CRM sync, or an agent's output you are about to save. Guard it on the way in, Repair what is already sitting in your database.
Honest alternatives
There is no single correct stack. Any of these would be a reasonable choice instead.
- Writing your own validation with Zod plus hand-rolled cleanup
- Clearbit or similar enrichment vendors
- A database with strict constraints and doing the rest by hand