What to use instead of CryptoCompare

The product

CryptoCompare was the aggregated crypto price API that everybody's first script used. One unauthenticated URL returned a price for a list of symbols; histoday, histohour and histominute returned OHLCV going back years; there was a per-exchange tape underneath the aggregate, a news feed, and social and sentiment history that nothing else was publishing for free. It is in a decade of tutorials, StackOverflow answers and half-finished side projects, and for most of that decade you could run those examples by pasting them into a terminal.

Three things happened, in this order.

16 October 2024 — the acquisition. CoinDesk announced it had bought CCData and CryptoCompare. The CCData brand has since been retired: ccdata.io returns a 301 to data.coindesk.com. The retail site at cryptocompare.com is still up and now carries a "Powered By CoinDesk Data" line; the API documentation moved to the CoinDesk developer portal.

The key requirement. Keyless access to min-api.cryptocompare.com is gone. As of 19 September 2026 the price endpoint answers 401 with API key required, please refer to the documentation at https://developers.coindesk.com/. That is a live host refusing an unauthenticated caller — not a 404, not a redirect to a successor. streamer.cryptocompare.com still answers 200. No sunset date for either host has been published on any vendor page, and the vendor's own documentation describes the Min API as frozen since November 2023 rather than as ending.

17 April 2026 — the free tier. The vendor published an announcement dated 17 April 2026: "As of May 21, 2026, we will be retiring our free API tier and accounts without a subscription will no longer have API access", and for an account without an active subscription, "your current access will stop returning data." That date has passed.

What is left is three plans with no numbers on them. Personal is applied for, non-commercial, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and capped at a lifetime call count the page does not state. Start-Up and Enterprise both say Contact. The old self-service pricing page at the CryptoCompare address does not exist either: it 301s to the legacy API host, which answers 401. Whatever you were paying before, there is now nothing published to compare it against.

That is the whole shape of this page. The product did not die. It stopped being something you could evaluate, budget for or start using without talking to somebody.

What to use instead

Start by asking whether you need an aggregate at all. CryptoCompare sold three separable things under one key: a consolidated print across venues, a symbol-mapping scheme, and an archive. Exchange-native APIs give you the third venue's own tape for free — if your script pulled BTC-USD candles and never cared which book they came from, an aggregator was doing work you were not using. Binance's public endpoints are free and unkeyed; CCXT normalises a hundred of them behind one interface if you want several venues without buying a feed.

If what you had was price and histoday, and you want to stay free. CoinGecko's API is the nearest thing in shape: coin-level current prices and daily history across thousands of assets, keyed, metered in credits, with a free Demo plan you can sign up for without a sales call. It is coin-level rather than venue-level, so a per-exchange OHLCV call does not port across; see the migration notes.

If what you had was CCCAGG, and the number has to be defensible. This is the case where free replacements do not apply. A valuation, a tax basis or an audit trail needs a rate with a written methodology behind it, not a mean of whatever was trading. Coin Metrics is the closest match in this catalogue — reference rates with published methodology, per-exchange market data across 68 venues and network metrics on the same key, and a free tier that does not require a key at all — but it is a different rate, not a continuation of CCCAGG. Splicing one series onto the other produces a discontinuity on the join date, and it will be your discontinuity to explain.

If what you had was the news, social or sentiment feed. No price API replaces it. Messari covers the news and asset-profile side.

If you want to stay. CoinDesk Data is the same endpoints, and it is first on the list above because the ordering rule is coverage and nothing else covers as much of the original. That is not a recommendation to stay — it is what staying costs: a subscription on a price you have to ask for, on a product whose own pages currently disagree about whether the Personal plan still issues a working key.

What you give up

The keyless URL, and everything built on it. Not just your code — every tutorial, notebook and Gist you might want to lean on. Anything you find online that pastes a min-api URL into a browser is now describing something that returns 401. There is no replacement for this anywhere; the keyless call is rare enough now that Coin Metrics advertises it as a feature.

A price you can look up. The old self-service pricing page is gone and none of the three current plans shows a figure. A tool nobody can quote cannot be compared on cost, budgeted for by somebody without purchasing authority, or picked in an afternoon. This is the actual loss, and it is larger than the free tier: the free tier ended on a date, but the published rate card ended without one.

CCCAGG as a continuous series. Every replacement here computes a different number from a different venue set with a different methodology. If you have history stamped with CryptoCompare's aggregate and you move, you own a seam.

Social and sentiment history. CryptoCompare published per-coin social metrics going back years, free, and that is not a normal thing for a price API to do. Nothing in this catalogue continues that series. Santiment and Messari sell adjacent data; neither is a backfill of it.

Depth of archive, possibly. The vendor's own pages claim the history two different ways — "dating back to 2010" on the data site, "since January 2013" in the API introduction — so what you gave up is not a number anybody has stated consistently. Ask for the oldest timestamp you need, at the granularity you need it, before you plan around either figure.

Migration notes

Expect to rewrite the client layer, not change a base URL. None of the replacements here returns CryptoCompare's response envelope.

• The response shape. CryptoCompare wrapped everything in {"Response": ..., "Data": ..., "Err": ...} and signalled failure inside a 200 as often as with a status code. CoinGecko, the exchange APIs and Coin Metrics all return plain JSON and use HTTP status codes. Any error handling that reads Response == "Error" silently stops catching anything.
• Timestamps. CryptoCompare's time fields are Unix seconds. Exchange APIs are mostly milliseconds — Binance's klines certainly are — and Coin Metrics uses RFC 3339 strings. A seconds value read as milliseconds lands in January 1970 and sorts to the front of your series rather than throwing.
• Symbols. fsym/tsym is a pair of tickers. CoinGecko keys on its own coin IDs, which you have to look up and cache; exchanges use their own market strings with their own separators and their own names for the same asset. Building the mapping table is most of the work, and it is the part that fails quietly when a vendor relists a ticker.
• Aggregate versus venue. A CryptoCompare call without an exchange parameter returned CCCAGG. The equivalent on the new host is a market parameter naming an index such as cadli or ccix, and on the exchange APIs there is no equivalent at all — you get that venue's book. Two of those three numbers will differ for the same minute, and the difference is not a bug.
• Rate limits are per account, not per key. On the current CoinDesk portal every key on an account shares one quota, so issuing a second key to isolate staging from production does not work; the vendor's own advice is a second account. Limits are counted in calls rather than credits, which is the opposite of how CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap meter.
• The cryptocompare package on PyPI is not the vendor's. It is published by an individual and no first-party SDK is named anywhere in the current documentation. If your migration plan is "pin the library and wait", there is nobody contractually on the other end of that.
• The old documentation URL is dead, but the spec is not. min-api.cryptocompare.com/documentation returns the API's own 401 rather than a page. The Min API reference is republished on the new developer portal under /documentation/legacy, which is where to check what your old calls were supposed to return before you replace them.

The rest of the field is in Crypto Market Data APIs.