What to use instead of Nomics

The product

Nomics was a crypto market-data API with a public price site on the front of it. The site listed assets and exchanges and ran a currency converter; the strapline it carried was "first to list new assets", and breadth of the long tail was the thing it sold. Behind it sat a metered REST API, and the endpoint list is worth reading because it explains who used it: currency ticker, historical candles, exchange and market data, one-minute candles on individual markets, gapless raw trade data, one-minute order-book snapshots, and a price-predictions feed. The per-market endpoints carried a footnote — "where available on exchanges that make this data public" — which is the honest version of a claim most aggregators do not bother to qualify.

It was billed by the call, and cheap to start. As the pricing page stood in January 2022: Testing at 1 dollar a month for 1,000 calls, Standard at 45 dollars for 50,000, Pro at 450 dollars for 600,000, then Enterprise. The per-thousand rate fell from a dollar to 75 cents across the tiers. A dollar a month for a real key is why Nomics turns up in so many side projects, dashboards and student notebooks, and why its disappearance broke a long tail of things nobody was maintaining.

Then it stopped. The notice that replaced the site is six sentences, and the whole of it is:

Dear Nomics User,

Unfortunately, we are sunsetting this website effective today. Thank you for using Nomics.com over the years. We want to extend our sincerest appreciation to our users; it's been a pleasure to serve you.

We do this with a heavy heart, and we are not taking this step lightly. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Thank you, The Nomics.com Team

No date, no buyer, no successor, no migration path. The date has to be recovered from the artefacts around it: the origin still serves that page and reports it as last modified at 19:29 GMT on 3 April 2023, and the certificate issued for the domain that day was minted at 18:02 GMT and left to expire on 2 July 2023. Both point at the same afternoon.

What the domain does now is the unusual part, and it is worth knowing before you go looking. Checked on 21 September 2026: the .com registry still publishes a DNSSEC delegation record for nomics.com whose key tag matches none of the keys the zone's own nameservers are serving. The practical effect is that any resolver which validates — which is to say Google's, Cloudflare's and most consumer ISPs' — returns SERVFAIL rather than an address. Ask the authoritative nameservers directly, or ask a resolver with validation disabled, and the name resolves fine and the origin returns the notice above, over a certificate that expired three years ago. api.nomics.com is a cleaner death: the authoritative servers return NXDOMAIN, meaning the hostname was removed from the zone rather than left dangling.

One note on sourcing: the notice above was read from the Nomics origin itself on 21 September 2026, with DNSSEC validation and certificate verification bypassed, because neither is survivable from a normal client. The pricing figures come from an Internet Archive capture of the Nomics pricing page taken on 8 January 2022.

What to use instead

Say the shape of the work first: this is a client rewrite, not a base-URL swap. Nomics used its own asset identifiers and its own market keys, and no provider here maps them. Whatever you replace it with, you are rebuilding the symbol layer, the pagination and the error handling. Budget for that rather than for an afternoon.

If you were listing everything. CoinGecko API is the closest match to what most Nomics keys actually did — current prices, market data and daily history across 18,000-odd coins and 1,500-odd exchanges, plus on-chain DEX data, from a free Demo plan that needs a key but not a card. It is the only pick that beats Nomics on price, because Nomics never had a free tier at all. CoinMarketCap API is the same bet on a different index, with 15,000 credits a month free; its meter counts data points returned rather than calls made, so a wide request is not one unit, which is a genuinely different accounting model to plan around.

If you were pulling per-market data rather than an aggregate. The Nomics endpoints that mattered to serious users — one-minute candles on individual markets, gapless raw trades, order-book snapshots — are not what the index APIs sell. CoinAPI is the replacement in that shape: one symbol scheme over 400-plus venues, REST, WebSocket and FIX, normalised on their side. The catch is the price floor. There is no free plan, entry is a card on file, and REST is metered in credits while WebSocket is metered in gigabytes, so the 45-dollar habit does not port.

If Nomics was a price you were citing. This is the case where breadth is the wrong axis. Coin Metrics sells reference rates with a published methodology, which is what you want if the number ends up in a valuation, a NAV or an invoice rather than on a dashboard — and its Community tier needs no key and no account, though it is daily asset metrics only, with no exchange market data. If the reason you cared about a price's provenance is not obvious yet, where the bitcoin price comes from is the background.

If you want the other long-running aggregate. CoinDesk Data is CryptoCompare renamed, and it covers aggregated spot, derivatives, index and news data in one place the way Nomics did. Worth saying plainly: it retired its own free API tier in May 2026 and publishes no prices for the plans that remain, so it is a quote-and-wait, not a signup.

If what you had was really a backfill. Anyone whose Nomics calls ran once and wrote to a database wants history, not an API. Kaiko has tick trades and order books back to 2010 by REST, gRPC or cloud delivery, and Tardis.dev has tick data and options chains from 64 exchange feeds since 2019 as files to replay. Both are priced as market-data vendors rather than as APIs, and neither has anything resembling a dollar tier.

What you give up

The dollar entry point for per-market microstructure. This is the specific loss, and nothing on the list closes it. For 45 dollars a month Nomics sold one-minute candles on individual markets, gapless raw trade data and order-book snapshots. Of the picks, the two with generous free tiers (CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap) do not sell raw trades or book snapshots at all, and the ones that do (CoinAPI, Kaiko, Tardis.dev) are priced for companies. If your project depended on cheap tick-adjacent data, it did not lose a vendor — it lost a price point that no longer exists.

The long tail of assets, and being first to list them. Nomics sold breadth, and newly listed assets were the point. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap are both large indexes, but a token that appears on one and not the other is an ordinary occurrence, and listing policies are editorial decisions made by the vendor, not facts. Anything that depended on an asset existing in the index on the day it launched needs a different design, usually a DEX-level source rather than an aggregator.

The identifiers. Nomics' currency ids and market keys were its own, and because the service is gone there is no mapping table to migrate against, not even a stale one. If you stored Nomics ids in a database, they are now strings whose meaning lives only in whatever documentation you kept.

A name that fails cleanly. This is the operational one. Code still pointed at nomics.com does not get a 404 or a 410 it can branch on — on a validating resolver it gets SERVFAIL, which is a temporary failure by definition, so well-behaved clients retry it, back off and retry again instead of giving up. api.nomics.com at least answers NXDOMAIN. Anything in your dependency tree that still imports a Nomics client is worth deleting rather than leaving to time out.

Any terms you were relying on. Whatever Nomics permitted you to do with its data went with the site, and the replacements decide that question for themselves. Free tiers are usually the most restrictive — see redistribution — so a project that displayed Nomics data publicly should read the new provider's terms before repointing, not after.

Migration notes

• Calls are not credits. Nomics billed per call. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap meter credits, and CoinMarketCap counts the data points a response returns, so one wide query can cost many units. A job sized against a Nomics call budget will not land where you expect. Read rate limit alongside the pricing page, because the two limits are separate and either can stop you.
• "Gapless" was a promise, and it does not come with you. Nomics named that property explicitly. Most replacements return what the venue returned, gaps and all, and a missing minute reads as a flat candle rather than as an error. If a downstream calculation assumed continuity, add the check you did not need before.
• Aggregate prices and venue prices are different questions. Nomics served both. If you replace an aggregated ticker with a single venue's tape, or with a reference rate, the number changes character: one is a vendor's blend, one is a venue's last trade, one is a methodology. See OHLCV for the ways a candle can be built and what each one is claiming.
• Candle boundaries and timestamps. Check whether the new provider stamps a candle at its open or its close, whether it works in seconds or milliseconds, and whether a daily candle rolls at UTC midnight. Every one of these has broken a migration, and none of them raises an error.
• Exchange coverage is a moving set. Nomics' exchange list included venues that have since failed or delisted. No replacement backfills a dead venue's markets, so a series that spans 2021 will have holes wherever it depended on one.
• Anything stamped after 3 April 2023 that claims Nomics as its source did not come from Nomics. It came from somebody's cache, or from a vendor that copied the data before the lights went out.

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