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All of the major credit bureaus offer APIs. But you have to get approved (not easy) and pay. Credit information is both confidential and proprietary.

I wonder how easy or difficult it is for loan lending startups to get access to these APIs and if the developer experience for the api is good enough for them to keep using it.

There are a few apps that do free credit monitoring by doing API requests to the major bureaus on the backend.

which apps? and is this kinda like stripe where anyone can make an api request to the bureaus?

Checking your own score? Or anybody's score?

Both. But for the latter, I would imagine you have to demonstrate that you're doing it for the right reason such as you're a bank and you want to check if someone has good credit score before lending some money.

Ask HN: API for credit scores