Binance Market Data API

What it is

The set of endpoints Binance publishes for its own market: last price, order book, recent and historical trades, candles, 24-hour statistics, and on the futures side mark price, funding rate, open interest and the long/short ratio series. It is one venue's view of the market, published by the venue, and it is free.

This card is about that data API and nothing else. The exchange underneath is out of scope here — this catalogue does not list places to trade — and so are the private endpoints that need a key and a funded balance. What is in scope is the part that is sold, or in this case given away, on its own terms to somebody who will never open an account.

The single most useful fact about it is how little it asks for. Public market data carries the security type NONE, which means no key, no signature and no registration. Unauthenticated requests for the BTCUSDT price, the order book, klines, historicalTrades, the funding rate, open interest history and the European options exchange info all returned HTTP 200 on 19 September 2026. There is a dedicated market-data-only host, data-api.binance.vision, which serves the same thirteen REST endpoints and refuses everything else, plus a matching websocket host that carries market streams and no user-data stream at all.

Pricing

Free, in the sense that there is no price list and nothing to sign up for. There is no pricing page to check because there is no product page to price — the endpoints are simply open.

What you pay in is request weight, and unlike a credit balance it does not accumulate or carry over. There is also a commercial licence in the background that has no published price: the Vision Dataset Terms state that commercial use of the historical archive "requires a separate, written enterprise data license agreement executed with Binance", and no figure for that is published anywhere reachable. If your use is commercial, the real cost of this API is a negotiation, not a subscription.

Data & coverage

Rate limits are weighted, and they are counted per IP. The docs state it plainly — the limits are based on IPs, not API keys — and it decides your architecture before anything else does. Spot carries a REQUEST_WEIGHT budget of 6,000 per minute and a raw-request ceiling of 300,000 per five minutes, both readable live from exchangeInfo; USDS-M futures carries 2,400 weight per minute. Every response returns the running total in an x-mbx-used-weight-1m header, so you can watch the budget drain rather than guess at it.

The weights are not uniform, which is the trap. A klines call costs 2. An aggTrades call costs 4. A trades or historicalTrades call costs 25. An order book costs 5 at depth 100 but 250 at depth 5,000 — a fifty-fold difference behind one parameter. A 24-hour ticker for one symbol costs 2; the same endpoint with the symbol parameter omitted costs 80. Six thousand weight a minute is three thousand klines calls or twenty-four full-depth book snapshots, and only one of those numbers sounds generous.

Breaching it returns 429 with a Retry-After header. Ignoring the 429s gets the IP banned automatically with a 418, and the ban duration scales with repetition, documented as running from two minutes to three days.

Websockets are public too, and have their own limits. A connection accepts at most five incoming messages per second, counting pings and subscribe messages, and can carry up to 1,024 streams; new connections are capped at 300 per five minutes per IP. Any connection is dropped at the 24-hour mark by design, so reconnection is not an error path, it is the normal path.

History is deep and it is free. The klines endpoint returns BTCUSDT daily candles from 17 August 2017, at most 1,000 candles per call. Underneath that sits data.binance.vision, a plain HTTP directory of zipped CSV dumps — monthly and daily klines, trades, aggregate trades, and on the futures side funding-rate history. BTCUSDT daily klines are there from August 2017; the July 2017 file is a 404, which is how you find the real start rather than the advertised one. No account, no key, no rate limit beyond the ordinary.

Derivatives data goes past prices. Alongside funding rate and mark price, the futures API publishes open-interest history, the global long/short account ratio, the top-trader long/short position ratio and taker buy/sell volume — the series that usually appear behind a paid tier at an aggregator. All of them answered unauthenticated.

Integrations

Binance publishes its own Python SDKs, and the naming has moved: binance-sdk-spot (11.3.0, uploaded 2 September 2026) describes itself as the official Spot SDK, while the older binance-connector now describes itself in its own PyPI summary as a deprecated library. If you are following a tutorial written against binance-connector, you are following a deprecated one.

There is a first-party MCP server, documented as part of the developer docs and served at agent.binance.com/mcp/agentic. The docs list market data as public and needing no auth — tickers, order books, candles, funding — while trading requires an agentic sub-account that you fund yourself from the web UI. Note the shape of that carefully: an unauthenticated JSON-RPC initialize against the endpoint returned 401 on 19 September 2026, so while the market-data tools are unauthenticated, reaching the server at all still means connecting a Binance account. The REST and websocket endpoints have no such requirement.

Limitations

Redistribution is restricted on both halves, and only one of them is easy to read. The Vision Dataset Terms, version 1.0, last updated 26 August 2026, cover the flat-file archive and are unambiguous about it: the downloads are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; permitted use is academic research, non-monetised education, personal non-production backtesting and non-commercial open-source data science; you may not license, sub-license, sell, rent, lease, host or commercially exploit the datasets "or any derivative real-time or historical data feeds"; you may not integrate them into commercial financial products or commercial trading bot platforms; and any redistributed derivative must attribute Binance Vision and stay under the same ShareAlike licence. Those terms bind you "upon downloading, caching, querying, or otherwise utilizing" the data, so caching is explicitly inside the licence rather than outside it.

For the REST and websocket endpoints the clause is older and harder to reach, but it is there. The docs' own terms page is a one-line pointer to the Product Terms of Use on the main site, and that document — in every archived capture that carries its text, from October 2020 through February 2023 — states that without written consent from Binance, "Data feeding or streaming services that make use of any market data of Binance" are prohibited, alongside trading services built on Binance quotes and any website, app or service that charges for or otherwise profits from Binance market data "including through advertising or referral fees". The live page now returns nothing at all to an automated client, so whether that wording survives unchanged could not be confirmed on 19 September 2026 — but a public endpoint is not an absence of terms, and this one has a redistribution clause behind it. The API Key Terms are a separate document and govern keys rather than data. The dataset terms are ambiguous about their own reach on top of that: section 2.1 scopes them to data.binance.vision "and associated endpoints", while section 7.1 refers to the Vision repository "and API base endpoints". On any reading of the pair, showing this data to somebody who is not you is a thing to get in writing.

One venue, and its own view of it. There is no cross-exchange aggregation, no normalised symbology, no reference data beyond Binance's own instrument list, and nothing when Binance itself is down or has delisted a pair. Everything you build on it inherits a single point of failure that is also your data source.

Per-IP limiting punishes the obvious deployment. Scaling horizontally behind one egress address concentrates the whole weight budget on that address, and more API keys do nothing about it. The fix is egress IPs, which is a networking bill rather than a data bill, and it is not mentioned anywhere near the rate-limit documentation.

The free archive is the part you are most likely to misuse. It is trivially downloadable and non-commercially licensed with a ShareAlike condition — which means a backtest you run privately is fine, and the same data inside a product you charge for, or a derivative dataset you publish under any other licence, is not.

Nothing here is an SLA. There is no published status page for the market-data endpoints found during this check, no uptime commitment attached to a free unkeyed API, and the dataset terms reserve the right to "modify, redact, or discontinue access to any specific market pair, dataset, or endpoint at any time without prior notice".

Alternatives

The other venue-direct feeds are the same shape with different small print. OKX API is equally open and more tightly licensed; Bybit API is free and unkeyed unless your IP is in the US or mainland China, which decides it before any feature does; Coinbase Exchange API goes down to the order-by-order book and bars both redistribution and feeding the data to a model.

If you want more than one venue, the question changes rather than the vendor. CCXT gives you one client over a hundred of them and no data of its own; CoinAPI and CoinGecko API sell the cross-venue view as a product, which is what you are paying for once a single exchange's own view of the market stops being enough. For tick history deeper than the free archive, Tardis.dev and Kaiko are where that lives.