Last week was dominated by news of the first government shutdown in seventeen years. But at Sunlight it also marked a different, more cheerful milestone. Last week, Sunlight’s APIs served their billionth request!

The specifics of our systems mean that we can’t say for sure exactly who made the billionth call. Was it an advocacy organization asking their supporters to call Congress? A journalist digging into state legislation? Concerned citizens investigating money in politics? A grad student studying how politicians speak about shutdowns?

We don’t know! But all of these uses–and all the ones we can’t imagine–are thrilling to us, and we’re very grateful to the thousands of you who have signed up for a Sunlight API key and joined us in using technology to make our government more accessible, accountable and transparent.

So hey, let’s celebrate! On October 15th we’ll be giving away $100 worth of Amazon credit–good for servers or sundries–to one random user who has signed up for a free API key and made at least one successful API call (hint: our query builders make this really easy; or, if you’re feeling more ambitious, you can give our Codecademy curriculum a try).

But wait: there’s more! Our friends at Github–where we keep all of the code that powers our APIs–have generously offered to throw in a year’s worth of their medium plan and a handsome Octocat hoodie. Not bad!

So go ahead: grab an API key, give our APIs a spin and see how you like ’em. One of you might get some prizes out of it. All of you have our thanks.

Image via TEKILAKLUB.