From aloc-endpoints to ALOC Station: An Honest Founder's Story and the 1-Year Migration Roadmap

In August 2018, we wrapped our internal question database in a straightforward REST API, published it on GitHub as aloc-endpoints, added a Postman Collection, and shared a humble article on Medium titled Nigeria Past Questions API endpoints (JAMB, WAEC).

We hoped a few hobbyists might find it useful for a weekend hackathon. Instead, something incredible happened: developers across Nigeria and beyond flooded in.

Over the following years, more than 3,000 developers registered. You built university Post-UTME screening portals, WhatsApp study bots, mobile revision apps for rural communities, and tutorial center simulators. As traffic grew, so did our server bills. To keep the lights on, we introduced a lightweight paid tier alongside the generous free tier—not to chase massive venture profits, but simply to test whether the product could self-finance its hosting costs and pay typists to add more years and subjects.

It worked: the community rallied, and the servers paid for themselves.

Then, reality set in. Like most independent builders, we have 9-to-5 jobs, careers, and bills that an open-source educational API simply couldn't pay. Demands at our day jobs intensified, life got busy, and for a long stretch, ALOC was left running on autopilot in the background.

Yet, month after month, the server logs told an unmistakable story: the API never stopped being queried. Students were taking mock exams through your apps every single day. Emails still arrived with kind suggestions, error reports, and feature requests.

No matter how busy our day jobs were, the thought was always burning in the back of our minds: We never finished the original vision. Developers coming behind us still don't have the modern, rock-solid, structured assessment infrastructure they truly deserve.

By early 2026, we knew it was time. Leaving it on life support wasn't fair to our community. In June, we made the decision: no more half-measures. It was time to kickstart this idea in a bold, professional, and definitive way.

The all-new ALOC Station (aloc.com.ng) is the realization of that long-held dream—graduating completely from the old aloc.ng consumer experiment into enterprise-grade developer infrastructure. We spent the last few months rebuilding the engine from first principles to address everything modern builders need in 2026.

First, we completely eliminated raw, garbled OCR text. Nothing destroys student trust faster than seeing equations mangled into unreadable characters or missing scientific diagrams. In the new ALOC Station, every mathematical and chemical formula is stored in standardized LaTeX that renders cleanly in KaTeX and MathJax. All biology specimens, physics circuit diagrams, and geography maps are now hosted on high-availability, high-resolution CDNs.

Second, we moved far beyond flat question dumps. Education in the AI era requires depth. We organized the entire dataset into four progressive knowledge layers: from raw verified past questions (L1), to 100% curriculum taxonomy trees mapped to Bloom's cognitive taxonomy (L2), to human-verified step-by-step worked solutions and distractor trap analysis (L3), all the way up to semantic vector similarity search (L4) for AI agents.

Finally, we built the developer experience we always wished we had. Instead of wrestling with raw cURL requests, you can install our official TypeScript SDK (@massteck/aloc-sdk), deploy our open-source Next.js 15 CBT simulator in one click, run tests with our Python CLI generator, or connect our official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server (@massteck/aloc-mcp-server) directly to Claude Desktop and Cursor. And to protect exam integrity, our built-in Assessment Engine handles timed sessions and deterministic candidate seeds server-side, preventing DevTools answer leaks.

Because this project was born to ease developers' burdens—never to add to them—we will never pull the rug on your production applications or force a rushed migration.

Here is our clear, binding commitment to every builder currently relying on questions.aloc.com.ng: the legacy API will remain fully operational, monitored, and maintained until July 31, 2027. That gives you a full 1-year grace period to upgrade at your own pace without risking any downtime for your students or schools.

To make the transition completely painless, every developer who creates an account on aloc.com.ng/register immediately receives 1,000 free monthly credits. You can test requests, inspect topic hierarchies, and preview worked solutions in our interactive API Playground without spending a kobo or writing a single line of backend boilerplate.

When you're ready to switch, our step-by-step Developer Migration Guide provides exact route-by-route mappings and code snippets in TypeScript and Python. In most cases, updating your app takes fewer than twenty lines of code—primarily swapping your authentication header from AccessToken to X-ALOC-KEY. And if you ever get stuck or run high-volume production workloads, reach out directly to us at aloc.mass@gmail.com and we'll gladly walk you through it.

We learned our lesson years ago with the gamified app: ALOC's calling is NOT to build student-facing CBT apps, school portals, or revision games. Our role is strictly to build the invisible, reliable rails so that you can build the trains.

Our goal is to be the 'Stripe of African Educational Content.' When any developer in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, or London wants to build an educational tool for African students, ALOC Station will always be the fastest, easiest, and most trusted place to start.