Redistribution

The word is not on the pricing page. It is in the terms, and most readers meet it for the first time in the same week — the key works, the prototype renders a chart, and somebody asks whether that chart can go in front of customers. The answer is a different product from the one they bought, at a price that is usually not published.

How it works

A market-data licence grants two things that read as one. The first is the right to use the data — internally, for your own trading, research, risk and reporting. The second is the right to put it in front of anybody who is not you, which covers users, clients, a public dashboard and an API of your own. That second right is redistribution, and across this catalogue it is granted separately, priced separately, and frequently not granted at all.

The distinction underneath is older than crypto and was inherited wholesale. The New York Stock Exchange's Non-Display Use Policy defines non-display use as accessing, processing or consuming market information "for a purpose other than in support of data recipient's display or further internal or external redistribution" — three uses, licensed on three different bases. An algorithm that reads a price and never shows it to a human is its own billable category there, declared annually on a form. That is the vocabulary crypto vendors picked up, and they apply it unevenly.

CoinAPI's usage policy, as its card records, puts customer-facing dashboards, public APIs, trading terminals, white-label platforms and market-data widgets on the not-permitted side, and internal trading, research and risk on the allowed side — the display line drawn exactly where an exchange would draw it. The terms behind the Coinbase Exchange API go further and reach display itself, barring redistribution, display or dissemination of the data — or anything derived from it — to any third party outside your organisation. CoinGecko's API terms, dated 5 September 2025, draw the line in a third place: reselling, sub-licensing and syndicating access are prohibited, showing the data to your users is expected, and the price of showing it is an attribution line. Tardis.dev sells a fourth shape, permitting resale of aggregated derived data at ten-minute resolution or coarser, with Coinbase carved out of even that.

Same word, four meanings, none of them visible until you open the terms. Sixteen of the 92 cards here carry a redistribution clause specific enough to write down, and no two of them say the same thing.

Why it matters here

A free tier is a statement about the bill, not about the licence. The three venue-direct feeds in this catalogue are free and effectively keyless, and all three restrict what you may do with what they serve: Binance API, OKX API and the Coinbase Exchange API each require written consent before the data reaches a third party, and OKX's clause catches the unpaid hobby dashboard as explicitly as the commercial one. The same holds on paid platforms at the low end. Dune's own plan comparison reads Internal use only on Free, Analyst and Plus alike, with a custom commercial licence reserved for Enterprise — price is not what separates those tiers, the right to show the numbers to anybody else is. Glassnode starts commercial use at Professional and still marks redistribution Custom above it. Nansen prohibits redistribution of its labels and leaderboards outright, which is most of what it is bought for.

So the thing most readers are actually building — a dashboard, a widget, a public P&L page, an app that shows a price — is the thing the tier they are building on does not license. The prototype works, the invoice is zero, and the product is unlicensed. The exceptions exist and are worth knowing: CoinMarketCap's free Basic tier carries commercial use rights, for one product with up to 100,000 users, and still forbids reselling the data as a standalone service.

Finding the price of the right tier is then a second problem, because redistribution is usually the first tier with no number on it. That is the same wall described in the tools you cannot buy without a sales call and why this market won't quote you a price, and it is why redistribution is the expensive word rather than merely the restrictive one.

What to ask before you sign

Which of the three am I buying? Internal use, display to my own users, or the right to resell. Ask for the answer per use, not per plan name, and get it in the order form rather than in an email.

Does the restriction follow derived data? Charts, aggregates, indicators, a model trained on the feed. Several terms here say yes in so many words, and a transformation you consider substantial is not an exception unless the contract calls it one.

What counts as my organisation? Affiliates, contractors, a client on a shared dashboard, a regulator. The boundary is defined in the terms and it is narrower than most teams assume.

Is attribution the price, or a condition on top of the price? Where display is permitted with a credit line, the exact wording and placement are usually specified.

What happens at the venue level? A vendor reselling exchange data passes on obligations it does not control, which is the subject of what exchange API terms actually let you do. Ask which venues in the feed are covered by the redistribution right you are being sold, and which are carved out.