SanAPI

What it is

The GraphQL endpoint under Santiment's dashboard, sold as its own product with its own plans. The vendor puts it plainly: SanAPI "is the GraphQL API that powers Sanbase". One endpoint, one schema, about 1,273 metrics covering on-chain activity, social volume and sentiment, development activity and prices, across fourteen chains.

Where this card ends and Santiment begins. That card is the dashboard — charts, screeners, alerts, insights, bought by somebody who wants to look. This one is the feed, bought by somebody who wants the numbers inside their own code. They are the same data and they are not the same purchase, and the giveaway is the call budget: a Sanbase Pro subscription at 49 USD a month includes 5,000 API calls, while the cheapest plan sold as SanAPI includes 300,000. If you hit the dashboard's allowance, the upgrade path is not a bigger dashboard.

There is a first-party Python client, sanpy, MIT-licensed, 0.14.0 on PyPI as of 20 April 2026.

Pricing

Two published plans and a quote. Essential is 160 USD a month, or 1,788 a year, which works out at 149 a month. Pro is 420 USD a month, or 4,788 a year, at 399 a month. Both figures above are the month-to-month rate; the annual equivalent is in each tier's note. Beyond Pro the plan is "custom", and the billing catalogue shows what custom has meant in practice — private plans at three and six million calls a year, and one at 18,900 USD a year.

The free plan needs no card and no key.

The documentation and the billing system disagree about what is on sale. The academy's plans page, last updated 28 October 2025, describes the API tiers as Business Pro and Business Max at 600,000 and 1,200,000 calls a month. Those plan codes are still in the billing catalogue and are both marked private — grandfathered, not purchasable. What is actually purchasable today is Essential and Pro, and Essential is a tier the documentation does not mention at all. The same drift shows up in the API itself: the restrictions query accepts BUSINESS_PRO as a plan name and rejects ESSENTIAL. Read the pricing page, not the manual.

And do not read the billing endpoint either, tempting as it is. The public GraphQL will list the vendor's products and plans to an unauthenticated caller, which is how the figures above were confirmed — but it returns two products that are not on sale and have not been for years. Sandata, which the vendor's own knowledge base describes as a beta area, still carries plans at 50, 140 and 290 USD a month; Exchange Wallets, which was an add-on rather than a product, still carries one at 200. Both are rows left in a billing table: the server code that named them was deleted in February 2024, santiment.net/sandata/ now redirects to the home page, and neither appears in the vendor's current product list. The query that returns them filters plans by name and never filters products at all, so anything still owning a plan row comes back looking live. Use it to check a price you already found on the pricing page, not to discover one.

Data & coverage

Fourteen chains, from the vendor's own list dated 24 February 2026: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRPL, BNB Chain, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Cardano, Dogecoin, Polygon, Avalanche, Optimism, Arbitrum, ICP and Solana. The vendor's own caveat is worth repeating — not every supported chain carries exchange, label or miner metrics, and price data exists for assets whose chain is not on that list.

The entitlement model is queryable, which is rare enough to be the reason to pick this product. getAccessRestrictions returns, per plan, every metric with a flag for whether you can read it at all, whether it is windowed, and the exact restrictedFrom and restrictedTo dates. Run against the free plan on 19 September 2026 it returns 1,273 metrics, of which 641 are accessible, 544 of those are windowed, and 97 come with no restriction at all. Against Pro it returns all 1,273 accessible and none restricted. Nobody has to take a marketing claim about "full access" on trust here, and no other card in this category can say that.

What the free window actually is. One year back, ending 30 days ago. Checked on a restricted metric the same day: active_deposits came back restrictedFrom: 2025-09-19, restrictedTo: 2026-08-20. The documentation says this twice and says it differently — one paragraph says a year, the next says "the last 2 years of data with the last 30 days excluded". The API is the one to believe.

Integrations

GraphQL over a single endpoint, with sanpy as the first-party Python client and an MCP connector documented under the vendor's AI toolkit that authenticates with the same API key. Output is JSON from the API; CSV export belongs to the dashboard, not here.

Limitations

The free tier is a sample, not a tier. 1,000 calls a month is thirty-three a day, and the 97 metrics that come unwindowed are 7.6% of the catalogue. It is genuinely useful for deciding whether to buy and genuinely unusable for anything that runs on a schedule.

Batching costs you. One GraphQL query is one call, and a request carrying five queries is billed as five. The technique that reduces HTTP round trips does not reduce your bill, and a client that batches by default will burn an allowance faster than a naive one.

The price step from the dashboard is steep. Sanbase Max at 249 USD a month gives 80,000 calls. The next rung that is sold as an API plan is 160 a month for 300,000 — cheaper per call and dearer per month than nothing, but there is no rung between 5,000 and 300,000 that is priced as an API.

The documentation lags the product by months. Two of the three pages read for this card carry "Updated" dates of October 2025 and February 2026, and the plans page describes tiers that are no longer on sale. The queryable restrictions endpoint is the antidote, and it is the only part of the entitlement story that cannot go stale.

This product does not give an opinion, and that is a difference from its sibling. The Sanbase card carries ai_features: recommendations because Santiment's agent layer returns prose with a directional conclusion about an asset. The API returns numbers. The distinction is real but it is thinner than it looks: the MCP connector runs on this product's key, and what an agent does with the numbers afterwards is not something the endpoint constrains. The flag here describes the endpoint, not the toolkit around it.

Alternatives

Within the same shape — a curated metric set sold as a feed rather than a screen — Glassnode is the direct comparison and prices its packages annually rather than monthly, CryptoQuant covers exchange flows more deeply, and Coin Metrics is the one with a citable reference rate. For chain data you query yourself rather than metrics somebody else defined, Dune and Allium are the other form of this category.