Santiment

What it is

Santiment is a curated metric set with a second axis most of this category does not have. Next to the on-chain series — exchange in and outflows, holder distribution buckets, MVRV, dormant supply, address balances — it computes social metrics from Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, Discord, 4chan and BitcoinTalk, and developer activity from public repositories, on the same assets and the same time axis. The proposition is that you can put crowd behaviour and chain behaviour on one chart and look at them together.

The dashboard is called Sanbase and it is what most readers of this category will be buying. The same library is sold programmatically as SanAPI, priced separately and at a different scale, and reached over GraphQL or an official MCP server. Asked for its metric list without a key on 19 September 2026, the API named 1,165 metrics; the vendor puts asset coverage at the top 3,000 by market capitalisation plus specific requests.

Pricing

Three plans on the individual side. Free is 0 USD, Sanbase Pro is 49 USD a month, and Sanbase Max is 249 USD a month; annual billing takes about 10% off, at 529 and 2,700 USD a year. There is a 14-day trial of the paid product, and holding the vendor's own token takes 20% off Pro and Max — that arrangement is denominated in a token whose price moves, so no figure for it appears above. Annual plans can be paid in ETH, BTC, USDC or USDT.

What the free tier actually withholds is time. The dashboard runs 30 days behind present day, the top three entries in Trending Coins are hidden, the screener has no filters or sorting, and alerts are capped at three that expire after 30 days. It is a good way to learn the metric vocabulary and a poor way to watch anything.

The API ladder is the part that catches people out, because it is metered separately from the dashboard. Free allows 1,000 calls a month, Sanbase Pro 5,000, Sanbase Max 80,000, and the per-minute ceiling is 100 on all three. Restricted metrics come back with one year of history and a 30-day lag on Free and Pro, and two years with no realtime restriction on Max — so Max is the cheapest plan on which the API returns today's number.

Above that sits SanAPI, a separate business product rather than a bigger Sanbase seat. Its two published plans are 420 and 999 USD a month, at 600,000 and 1,200,000 calls a month with per-minute ceilings of 600 and 1,200, with an enterprise tier above them. If you are buying this to feed a system rather than to look at charts, that is the price list that applies to you.

Data & coverage

Chains first, because the marketing and the machine disagree. The API's own getAvailableBlockchains returned twelve chains on 19 September 2026 — Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, XRP, BNB Chain, Dogecoin, Polygon, Cardano, Avalanche, Optimism and Arbitrum. The academy's supported-blockchains page, stamped as updated in February 2026, lists fourteen and includes Solana and ICP. The pricing page's FAQ lists a third set, thirteen, with ICP and without Solana. Take the API's answer.

Depth is wildly uneven across those twelve, and the same call says so field by field. Exchange metrics exist only for Ethereum and Bitcoin. Entity labels exist only for Ethereum. Miner metrics exist for Ethereum and Bitcoin, and top-holder metrics for those two plus BNB Chain. The remaining nine chains return pure on-chain, balance and on-chain-financial metrics and nothing else — so "we cover Cardano" and "we cover Ethereum" are not the same sentence, and the flow analysis that makes this product interesting is largely an Ethereum product.

Definitions are published per metric, which is the right habit and rarer than it should be. Active addresses is defined as the distinct addresses that participated in a transfer in the window, each counted once, senders and receivers both. That is the widest of the three ways to count, and it roughly doubles a sender-only figure on a chain with ordinary transfer patterns — worth knowing before comparing this series to another vendor's.

Resolution is genuinely fine for this category. The metric metadata gives a minimum interval of five minutes for on-chain and social series and one second for price, and the 24-hour active address window is a rolling one recomputed every five minutes rather than a calendar day.

Social metrics are counts and classifier output over public posts — volume, dominance, sentiment balance per platform, trending words and stories. They measure what was said, which is not the same claim as what is true, and the classifier's accuracy is not something the vendor publishes a figure for.

Integrations

The API is GraphQL rather than REST, which is unusual enough here to plan for, and the schema is introspectable without a key. sanpy is the official Python client. The Sheets add-in pulls metrics into Google Sheets from Pro upward, alerts can fire webhooks from Pro upward, and charts export to CSV — capped at two years of history on Pro, uncapped on Max.

There is a first-party MCP server at the API host. It answered an unauthenticated initialize call on 19 September 2026 identifying itself as sanbase-metrics version 1.0.0, authorises over OAuth, and documents seven tools — metric and asset discovery, time-series fetch, ranking assets by a metric, insight discovery and reading, trending stories, and a combined trends view. A free account is enough to connect it.

Three components are published on GitHub, and the licence in each case is read from the LICENSE file rather than the README. sanbase2, the GraphQL server behind the app, is MIT. sanpy is MIT. santiment-connector, the Claude connector, is BSD 2-Clause. All three had commits pushed within the last four months and none is archived.

Limitations

What the AI surface emits, in plain words. Santiment's own page for AI agents says its connector and skills deliver "reports and recommendations you can act on", and one of the shipped skills is described as pure instructions with no data of its own — a prompt that tells an agent how to read crowd sentiment into a stance. So the honest description of the output is this: given a question, the agent fetches Santiment's metrics and returns prose that can and does include a directional conclusion about an asset. That is not a disclosure Santiment makes on the connector page, which carries no investment-advice language at all. Nothing on the tier list is a subscription to buy and sell calls, and the metrics themselves are plain data; the recommendation comes out of the agent layer bolted on top, and it is why this card carries the recommendations flag and the warning that goes with it. Treat that output as a draft argument to check, not as a signal, and note that the numbers underneath it are the same numbers you can chart yourself.

The self-serve SQL layer is closed to new users. Santiment Queries, the ClickHouse SQL interface over the same datasets, is documented with the line that the product is no longer offered and is supported only for legacy users. If you arrived wanting to write your own queries rather than take the curated metrics, this is not the product for that any more.

The open repositories are not a way to run this. The GraphQL server is genuinely MIT and genuinely the one behind the app, but the metric computation and the data it serves are not published. Self-hosting sanbase2 gets you an API with nothing behind it.

Labels are Ethereum-only and undated. The exchange, fund and whale labelling that makes the flow metrics readable exists for Ethereum, plus miner and top-holder sets for Bitcoin. There is no published revision date for the label set, so an address labelled as an exchange wallet stays labelled that way after the exchange stops using it, and you cannot tell from the data when the judgement was made.

The free tier is a demo, not a small plan. A 30-day lag is not a rate limit; it means the product cannot answer a question about this week at all. Budget for at least Sanbase Pro before deciding whether the metrics work for you, and for Sanbase Max before wiring anything to the API.

Three vendor pages disagree about the chain list, as above. Whatever else that indicates, it means the coverage page is not a thing to plan a build around — query getAvailableBlockchains yourself.

Nobody on this site has held a paid Santiment account. The numbers above are read from the vendor's pricing page, its academy, its public GitHub repositories and its own API on 19 September 2026, not from use.

Alternatives

SanAPI is this vendor's other product and the first fork in the road: the same metrics sold as a GraphQL API on its own plans and its own call budget, rather than as a dashboard.

Against other vendors, the social and developer series are what you are paying for here. Glassnode and CryptoQuant are deeper on the on-chain half and quiet on the social one, and both are more expensive once you want them programmatically — Glassnode's API is a separate annual contract in the thousands. Messari covers the narrative side with analyst-verified events instead of social aggregates.

For anyone who would rather define the metric than pick it from a catalogue, Dune sells the SQL layer, and the definitions come with it.