CoinGecko API

What it is

CoinGecko's data API, sold separately from the website most people know it by. What you are buying is the aggregation and the identifier layer: 18,000+ coins across 1,500+ exchanges under one ID scheme, plus the GeckoTerminal onchain dataset — 200+ networks, 1,800+ DEXes, 39M+ tokens — reachable with the same key. Those coverage numbers are the vendor's own, published on the front page of its documentation.

The buyer writes code. There is a website with charts and a portfolio tracker at the same brand; that is a different product with a different price and it is not what this card describes.

Delivery comes in three shapes: REST for on-demand queries on every plan, websockets for streaming coin prices and onchain trades on Basic and above, and webhooks that push metadata changes to your server, also Basic and above. Official TypeScript and Python SDKs, a terminal CLI and Google Sheets and Excel add-ins sit on top of the same key.

Pricing

Six plans. Demo is free forever and the paid ladder runs $35, $129, $499 and $999 a month month-to-month, with Enterprise quoted. Annual billing takes roughly 20% off — $29, $103.20, $399.20 and $799.20 a month respectively — and the figures above are the month-to-month rate, which is what you pay if you are not committing to a year.

Billing is by call credit rather than by request, so compare the credit allowance against your own call pattern rather than against another vendor's "calls" number. Per plan, that allowance is 10,000 credits a month on Demo, 100,000 on Basic, 500,000 on Analyst, 2,000,000 on Lite and 5,000,000 on Pro. Rate limits are 100 calls a minute on Demo, 300 on Basic, 500 on both Analyst and Lite and 1,000 on Pro — note that Lite quadruples your monthly credits without raising the per-minute ceiling at all, so it buys volume, not burst.

Every 4xx and 5xx response counts against the per-minute limit but deducts no credit, so naive retry logic burns burst rather than budget. Attribution is required on every plan including the free one; paid plans carry a commercial licence, while Demo's licence row reads only "Attribution required". One wrinkle: the Basic plan's own tagline reads "For personal use cases" while its licence row says Commercial, and the API terms tie the scope of the licence to each plan's description on the pricing page. If the product is your business, ask before shipping on Basic rather than Analyst. No plan lets you resell the API itself: the terms allow charging for products that integrate it, but not selling, sub-licensing or redistributing access to it without a separate agreement.

Data & coverage

Prices are aggregated across the exchanges CoinGecko tracks rather than taken from one venue, so the number is a composite and not a tape you can reconcile against a single order book. There are no order-book endpoints at all.

Volume is the composite's weakest number, and CoinGecko scores it rather than correcting it. Each pair and each spot exchange carries a Trust Score, which the methodology says the May 2026 Basilisk update rebuilt around volume and order-book depth instead of web traffic. The one adjusted figure the API used to return, trade_volume_24h_btc_normalized on the exchange endpoints, was removed from 16 June 2025; what is left is the raw figure, with per-ticker is_anomaly and is_stale flags beside it. Why the numbers disagree across providers is in why exchange volume numbers disagree.

Historical depth is the field most likely to decide the purchase, and it is gated three ways. The Demo API is restricted to the past 365 days. The Basic plan is restricted to the past two years. The full range needs Analyst or above, where the pricing table puts daily coin history from 2013 and hourly from 2018. Granularity is chosen for you from the range you request — 5-minutely within the last day, hourly for 2 to 90 days, daily beyond that — and you can override it to hourly for any 100-day window. The 5-minute and 1-minute overrides are Enterprise-only, with 5-minute data available from February 2018 and 1-minute data only from June 2026. The OHLC endpoint is coarser still: without its paid-only interval override it returns 4-day candles for any window beyond 30 days, which on Demo means every window longer than a month, and /coins/{id}/ohlc/range, with data from 9 February 2018, is Analyst and above.

"Real time" means different things per endpoint and per plan. The pricing table's Data Freshness row reads "from 60 sec" on Demo, "from 10 sec" on Basic and "Real-time" from Analyst up, and the docs state the cache interval on each endpoint page. Historical chart data is cached for five minutes on paid plans; the previous UTC day closes at 00:35 UTC on paid plans and 00:10 UTC on Demo. The websocket is the only genuinely push-based path, and it starts at Basic.

Beyond spot: derivatives tickers carry open interest, funding rate and basis across perpetual and expiring contracts; there are NFT collection floor prices and marketplace tickers; tokenized real-world assets — stocks, commodities and ETFs — have their own endpoint family; and the onchain side covers pool and token OHLCV, top token holders, and wallet balances and token transfers by address.

Integrations

The SDKs are coingecko-sdk on PyPI and @coingecko/coingecko-typescript on npm, both maintained by CoinGecko accounts and both released in September 2026. The obvious third name, pycoingecko on PyPI, is somebody else's wrapper and was last published in November 2024 — a common mistake worth not making.

The MCP server is official and comes in three forms: a keyless remote endpoint, a remote endpoint that authenticates your API key, and @coingecko/coingecko-mcp run locally. The keyless server answers unauthenticated requests on shared rate limits, which makes it the cheapest way to point an agent at crypto prices and the least predictable way to run one in production.

The CLI exports CSV and JSON and can stream the websocket to NDJSON, which is the only first-party path from this API to a flat file.

Limitations

The free plan is a one-year window, not a free tier of the whole product. Historical work reaching back more than two years is a $129-a-month decision, not a $35 one, because Basic stops at two years.

Minute-level history is Enterprise-only and, for the 1-minute series, starts in June 2026 — so no plan you can buy from the pricing page will backfill a minute-resolution study.

The onchain endpoints are not part of the keyless surface. An unauthenticated call to them returns 401 pointing at the pricing page, while the plain coin endpoints answer 200 in the same minute. Keyless access to the rest is rate-limited per IP and shared with everyone else on that address, which is why it behaves erratically from cloud hosts and Google Sheets. That is the whole of the documentation on it: the rate-limit page describes keyless access only as IP-based rate limiting shared across all users on the same address, with no number attached.

Webhook price alerts are listed as private beta; the only generally available webhook event is metadata changes. If you need alerting, you are still polling or streaming and building it yourself, which is why this card claims no alerts capability.

There are no order books and no trade-by-trade tape for centralized exchanges, and attribution is mandatory even on the free plan, which rules out silent embedding in a product that does not credit its sources. The wording differs by document: the API terms (5 September 2025) ask for "Powered by CoinGecko", the pricing FAQ for "Data provided by CoinGecko" with a link. The same terms ask for a stored cache to be refreshed at least every 24 hours and require all stored data to be deleted if CoinGecko terminates your access, so no plan buys a permanent archive.

Alternatives

The direct comparison is CoinMarketCap's API, which meters by data points returned rather than calls, keeps a larger free allowance and reaches back to 2010 on daily history from its third tier, but does not stream anything below that tier and publishes no network list for its DEX data. The rest of the field is in Crypto Market Data APIs.