# Crypto Market Data APIs

Price, order-book, trade and reference APIs for people writing their own code — and what the coverage numbers on the pricing page actually mean.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/market-data-apis*

## What this category is

APIs you call from your own code to get prices, order books, trades and the reference data that
ties them together. The buyer writes software — that is the line against the rest of the
catalogue. A dashboard you log into to read the same numbers is a different purchase, and a
product whose value is a chart on a screen belongs under
[charting](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/charting-platforms) or
[on-chain analytics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/onchain-analytics).

What is being sold here is not really data — the exchanges publish most of it for free — but
normalisation, uptime and history. One symbol scheme across two hundred venues, a feed that keeps
producing when a venue drops out, and a tick archive going back further than the venue itself
keeps. Those three are what the price is for, and the three hardest things to check from a pricing
page.

## Five jobs share this page, and they barely compete

Sixteen products call this category home, and each card carries a job facet. Reading the category
by that facet is more useful than reading it by vendor size, because a buyer almost never
shortlists across two of them.

**Live prices for an application** is the largest group and the one every comparison article is
about — [CoinGecko](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coingecko-api), [CoinMarketCap](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinmarketcap-api) and
[CoinAPI](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinapi) on the aggregator side, the venues' own endpoints
([Binance](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/binance-api), [Bybit](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bybit-api), [OKX](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/okx-api),
[Coinbase](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinbase-exchange-api)) on the other. Four of the sixteen cards are an exchange
publishing its own tape: free, fast, and blind to every venue but one.

**History, sold by the byte.** [Tardis.dev](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tardis-dev), [Kaiko](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/kaiko),
[CoinDesk Data](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coindesk-data) and [Massive](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/polygon-io-crypto) are bought for what
happened rather than what is happening. This is where the price is highest and the free tier
thinnest, because the archive is the asset.

**Derivatives structure.** [Amberdata](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/amberdata), [Laevitas](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/laevitas) and
[CoinGlass](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinglass) publish funding, open interest, liquidations and options surfaces
that the spot aggregators largely do not normalise at all.

**Benchmarks, and everything around them.** [Coin Metrics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coin-metrics) is filed under
reference data — rates and indexes with a published methodology, for people who need to point at
the rules rather than the number — and [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari) under news, here for research and
asset profiles as much as prices.

The use of that split is negative. If you need funding rates, most of these cards will not sell
them at any price. Work out which of the five you are in before reading a pricing page.

## Three words that mean nothing until you pin them down

**"Real time"** covers everything from a websocket tick pushed on trade to a REST endpoint served
from a fifteen-second cache. Both print as "real-time data", and fifteen of the sixteen cards here
record their latency as real-time, which shows how little the word discriminates. The one that does
not is Tardis.dev, and that is the honest case rather than the weak one: an archive delivered as
files is not a feed. What matters is the update interval on the tier you are buying, and whether
websockets are on that tier at all — several providers gate them behind a paid plan while
advertising real-time data on the free one, which is true of the product and false of the tier.

**"Historical"** covers everything from two years of daily candles to full order-book snapshots
from 2013. The useful question is not how far back but at what granularity how far back — daily
[OHLCV](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/ohlcv) for ten years and tick data for three months sit behind the same word on
the same page. A candle is an aggregation with the publisher's choices baked in, so two vendors'
one-minute bars for the same pair are routinely two different series before history enters the
conversation. Ask for the oldest timestamp you need, at the resolution you need it, before you pay.

**"Supported exchanges"** is a count, and counts include venues polled once a minute next to
venues with a direct feed behind them, plus venues that have stopped trading — removing a name
lowers a number on a marketing page. A count of 200+ tells you less than one name and its latency.

## The question that decides it, and you can answer it today

**Does the data leave your organisation?**

If the answer is no — an internal dashboard, a model you train, a bot trading your own book — the
cheapest correct answer is usually an exchange's own API, and the four venue cards exist so you can
check that before paying anyone. You give up cross-venue normalisation and keep the money.

If the answer is yes — a chart on your product, a price in your app, a number in a report you send
a client — then [redistribution](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/redistribution) decides, and it is a licence question
rather than a technical one. It is rarely on the pricing page, routinely in the API terms, and it
rules out the free route for several major venues. The paid redistributor layer exists precisely
because the free endpoints do not carry the right, which
[what exchange API terms actually let you do](https://cryptomarkets.tools/guides/exchange-api-terms) works through in full.

The follow-up is **whether you need DEX prints**. Nine of the sixteen cards report decentralised
venues alongside centralised ones; the seven that do not are the four exchange APIs plus Massive,
Tardis.dev and Laevitas. A pair that only trades on-chain is invisible to those seven, and no plan
upgrade fixes it.

## What the pricing actually looks like from inside

This is the most quoted-on-request category in the catalogue — three quarters of the cards carry a
tier with no number on it, against none at all in the backtesting libraries. The per-category
counts and what the gradient means are on
[tools you cannot buy without a sales call](https://cryptomarkets.tools/collections/priced-on-request) and
[why this market won't quote you a price](https://cryptomarkets.tools/guides/why-half-this-market-wont-quote-a-price).

Two things about that shape are specific to this category.

**The published prices are two clusters with a hole between them.** Read the cheapest paid month
on each card and five sit at or below 79 dollars — CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, CoinGlass, Massive
and CoinAPI — while three sit at or above 350 — Tardis.dev, Laevitas and Amberdata. Nothing is
priced in between. That gap is the boundary between self-serve data and licensed data, and
crossing it is a procurement decision rather than an upgrade.

**Only four cards carry a number on every tier they publish**: Binance, Bybit, OKX and Tardis.dev
— three exchanges giving away their own tape, one vendor selling files. Everybody else keeps a door
marked "contact us", and on [CoinDesk Data](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coindesk-data) and [Kaiko](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/kaiko) that is
every door.

## What to check before you commit

**Whether the [rate limit](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/rate-limit) is per key or per IP, and what unit it counts.**
A per-IP limit that looked generous becomes the binding constraint the moment the service runs on
more than one container. And credits, requests and weights are not the same unit — a plan
advertised at ten thousand calls may cost a hundred weighted units per call on the endpoint you
need. Normalise against your own query before comparing prices.

**How bulk data comes out.** Every card here returns JSON and most also offer CSV, but a year of
ticks is not a JSON response. Two list Parquet — Amberdata and Coin Metrics — and both sit at the
quoted end. If the plan is to load history into a dataframe, the delivery format costs more than
the price does.

**What happens during an outage on the venue underneath.** An aggregate price is a method — some
providers drop the failed venue and reweight, some hold the last trade, some keep publishing a
stale number without saying so. That is where two "accurate" providers disagree by a percent and
neither is lying, and it is the subject of
[where the bitcoin price actually comes from](https://cryptomarkets.tools/guides/where-the-bitcoin-price-comes-from).

## What is not here

**The exchanges themselves.** A venue's public data endpoint is a product on its own terms and
gets a card; the venue is not reviewed, rated or recommended anywhere on the site.

**Chain data sold as chain data.** Wallet balances, holder distributions, protocol revenue and
labelled flows are [on-chain analytics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/onchain-analytics), even when a DEX trade is
also a market event. RPC endpoints and indexing backends are plumbing, and out of scope entirely.

**Anything you look at rather than call.** A screen showing funding across forty venues is a
[screening product](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/charting-platforms); a screen you can also trade from is a
[terminal](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/trading-terminals). Several vendors here sell both and get two cards, priced
separately, because they are two purchases — which is why a vendor's name in the search box returns
more than one result.

**Products that have already gone.** [CryptoCompare](https://cryptomarkets.tools/alternatives/cryptocompare), whose terms
changed underneath its users, and [Cryptowatch](https://cryptomarkets.tools/alternatives/cryptowatch), which shut down, have
pages of their own. Read one before building against a free endpoint that feels permanent.

## What this category looks like

Counted across the 21 cards below, not quoted from anyone.

- **Free tier:** 15 of 21
- **Cheapest paid month:** median $64.5, across $35 to $600 — from the 12 cards that publish a monthly price
- **Has a "call us" tier:** 16 of 21
- **Publishes no tiers at all:** 1 of 21
- **Open source:** 1 of 21
- **Runs on your own machine:** 1 of 21
- **Ships an MCP server:** 15 of 21

## Cards

- [Amberdata Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/amberdata.md) — Spot, futures and options data — and one exchange's feed you can buy with a card.
- [Binance Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/binance-api.md) — One venue's own tape — prices, books, trades and funding, free and unkeyed.
- [Bybit Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/bybit-api.md) — Venue-direct spot, perps and options data with no key — if your IP is not in the US.
- [CCXT](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/ccxt.md) — One MIT client for 104 crypto exchanges, 76 of them over websocket.
- [Coin Metrics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coin-metrics.md) — Institutional reference rates, exchange market data and network metrics behind one API.
- [CoinAPI Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinapi.md) — One symbol scheme over 400+ venues, metered in REST credits and WebSocket gigabytes.
- [Coinbase Exchange API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinbase-exchange-api.md) — Free keyless spot data down to the order-by-order book — with a redistribution ban.
- [CoinDesk Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coindesk-data.md) — The old CryptoCompare API, renamed, re-hosted and no longer free.
- [CoinGecko API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coingecko-api.md) — Prices, market data and onchain DEX data for 18,000+ coins, via REST, websocket or MCP.
- [CoinGlass API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinglass.md) — Funding, open interest, liquidations and L2/L3 order books across thirty futures venues.
- [CoinMarketCap API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinmarketcap-api.md) — Prices, rankings, DEX and derivatives data billed by data points returned, not by call.
- [CryptoQuant](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptoquant.md) — Exchange reserves, miner flows and MVRV for four chains, as charts, alerts and an API.
- [Kaiko Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/kaiko.md) — Tick history back to 2010, by REST, gRPC stream or cloud delivery.
- [Laevitas](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/laevitas-platform.md) — Options screens, a vol surface and a strategy builder — free to look, 50 dollars to keep.
- [Laevitas API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/laevitas.md) — Options Greeks, a calibrated vol surface and funding data over REST, WebSocket or MCP.
- [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari.md) — Asset profiles, 500-source news and analyst-verified event monitoring, with an API.
- [OKX Market Data API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/okx-api.md) — Public v5 endpoints for spot, swaps, futures and options — open, and tightly licensed.
- [Massive Crypto API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/polygon-io-crypto.md) — Crypto trades, bars and websockets, sold in one plan together with forex.
- [SanAPI](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sanapi.md) — The GraphQL API under Sanbase, sold on its own plans with its own call budget.
- [Tardis.dev](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tardis-dev.md) — Tick-by-tick order books, trades and options chains from 64 exchange feeds since 2019.
- [Velo](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/velo.md) — Derivatives terminal with order entry on Bybit and Hyperliquid, and the API behind it.

## FAQ

### What is the cheapest real-time crypto price API?

Several providers give away a spot-price endpoint with no card, but the free tiers differ in what "real time" means rather than in price. Compare the update interval and the per-minute rate limit on each free tier before comparing the paid ones — a free endpoint refreshed on a fifteen-second cache and a free websocket are different products at the same price of zero.

### Do I need an exchange account to use a crypto market data API?

For public market data, usually not. Aggregators sell data on their own terms and issue a key against an email. An exchange's own public endpoints are generally open or key-gated without a funded balance, but its private endpoints are not — and a product that only exists alongside a funded exchange account is out of scope for this catalogue.

### How far back does free historical crypto data go?

Almost never as far as the marketing page implies. Free tiers commonly cap history at one year of daily candles, while full tick history from the exchange's own launch is the most expensive thing these vendors sell. Request the oldest date you actually need before committing — the endpoint will tell you where the history really starts.

### Can I use an exchange's free API inside my own product?

Open is not the same as licensed. Several large venues confine their public market data to personal or internal use in their API terms and require written consent before you redistribute it, put it in front of your own users or train a model on it. The technical door being unlocked tells you nothing about the licence, and the licence is the thing that decides whether you can ship.

### Why do two crypto price APIs disagree about the same pair?

Because an aggregate price is a method, not an observation. Which venues are included, how they are weighted, which trades are discarded as outliers and what happens when a venue stops responding are four choices every provider makes differently. Two providers can differ by a percent and neither be wrong. Read the methodology before treating the gap as a bug.