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

Five plans. Demo is free forever and the paid ladder runs $35, $129 and $499 a month month-to-month, with Enterprise quoted. Annual billing takes roughly 20% off — $29, $103.20 and $399.20 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 and 2,000,000 on Lite. Rate limits are 100 calls a minute on Demo, 300 on Basic and 500 on both Analyst and Lite — 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, which matters if your retry logic is naive. Attribution is required on every plan including the free one, and paid plans carry a commercial licence.

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.

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. 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.

"Real time" means different things per endpoint and per plan, 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 below 365 days 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.

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 — "Data provided by CoinGecko" with a link, which rules out silent embedding in a product that does not credit its sources.

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.