Tardis.dev

What it is

A tick-level archive of crypto market data, replayed on demand. Tardis.dev records exchange websocket feeds — not periodic REST polls — and keeps the raw messages, so what you get back is the order book as it actually moved, including every incremental L2 update and, where the venue publishes it, L3 market-by-order.

The buyer is somebody rebuilding a book to test against, not somebody watching a screen. There is no dashboard, no chart and no alerting. Two client libraries and a locally run replay server are the entire product surface, and the second thing to understand about it is that the live half of those libraries is free: Tardis.dev does not sell a real-time feed, and its docs say so in as many words.

Pricing

Five data plans — Perpetuals, Options, Spot, Derivatives, All Exchanges — crossed with four access types, so twenty prices. The cheapest way in is Perpetuals or Options at $350 a month on Academic, and the widest is All Exchanges on Business at $6,000. The minimum order is $300.

The access type matters more than the data plan, and the pricing grid is easy to misread on this point. Academic and Solo get downloadable CSV files and nothing else. The raw data replay API, the tardis-machine server and the instrument metadata API all start at Professional — $1,000 a month on the narrowest plan, $2,200 on All Exchanges. If you were planning to call an endpoint rather than download files, the entry price is not $350.

The billing interval decides how much history you can reach, which is unusual and expensive to discover late. Monthly billing reaches four months back, quarterly twelve months, yearly four years. Only Business on yearly billing reaches everything, back to 2019. Academic is restricted to quarterly or yearly billing, and as of 19 September 2026 the order form says Academic subscriptions are temporarily unavailable, with no reason or end date given.

Initial subscription payments are not refundable. Paddle is the merchant of record.

Data & coverage

The exchanges endpoint lists 64 ids. Twelve of them are frozen at a date — FTX and FTX US at 13 November 2022, Serum the same day, Mango at 14 October 2022, CoinFLEX at 7 April 2023, dYdX v3 at 30 October 2024, OKCoin at 1 October 2025, AscendEX at 7 July 2026 — leaving 52 still collecting. The count is also feeds rather than companies: Binance alone accounts for seven ids, from spot through USD-M and COIN-M futures to European options. Recent venues are there and dated, which is the useful signal — Hyperliquid from 29 October 2024, Lighter from 17 April 2026, Aster from 23 August 2026, Polymarket from 25 May 2026.

History for the original venues starts 30 March 2019 and not a day earlier, whatever "7+ years" on the front page suggests about the market's own age. The dead exchanges are the reason to pay: FTX is retained end to end, 1 August 2019 to 13 November 2022, which is the kind of tape no exchange keeps for you.

Nine CSV data types: incremental L2 updates, 25-level and 5-level book snapshots, trades, quotes, book ticker, derivative ticker, liquidations and options chains. Every row carries both the exchange's own timestamp and the arrival timestamp at Tardis.dev, in microseconds since epoch, UTC — which is what lets you tell venue latency from collection latency instead of guessing. Options chains carry bid, ask and mark implied volatility plus delta, gamma, vega, theta and rho, but these are passed through from the exchange and the schema says each is empty where the venue does not publish it; nothing here is computed by Tardis.dev.

Freshness is next-day. A given day's datasets appear the following day at around 06:00 UTC.

Integrations

Two first-party clients, tardis-dev on npm and tardis-dev on PyPI, both named in the vendor's own quickstart samples, so the obvious package name is genuinely theirs. Both are MPL-2.0, read from the LICENSE files rather than a badge. A third component, tardis-machine, runs on your own machine via Docker or npm and exposes local HTTP and websocket endpoints that replay history in the shape of a live feed, so backtest code and production code can share a handler. It needs a Professional subscription.

Data arrives either as exchange-native messages, byte for byte what the venue sent, or in a normalised cross-exchange format the libraries produce. Rate limits are 3,000 requests a minute on Academic, Solo and Professional and 9,000 on Business, counted per account across all keys — not per key and not per IP, so more containers do not buy more throughput.

Limitations

No hosted real-time data, at any price. This is the single thing most likely to be assumed wrongly. The subscription buys history; live streaming is done by the open-source clients talking directly to exchanges, which needs no key and no payment.

One API key, and one source IP per key at a time, on everything below Business. Business gets up to ten keys and multiple IPs. A single key pinned to a single IP is a constraint on how you deploy, not just on how much you use.

Redistribution is barred except at ten-minute resolution. The licence permits reselling aggregated derived data — OHLC or OHLCV candles at ten minutes or longer, with no raw data exposed and no way to reconstruct it. Anything more granular reaching a third party is outside the agreement. Coinbase data is carved out of even that exception, and Coinbase reserves the right to inspect your use of its data on ten days' notice.

The machine-learning clause is stricter than most. Internal task-specific quantitative models for research, backtesting, execution and risk are permitted. Training, fine-tuning, distilling or benchmarking any other AI or ML model is not, and you may not sell or license to third parties a model developed using the data — the terms say this applies even where the model was built for permitted internal use and retains nothing reconstructable. If the plan is to train something and ship it, read clause 9.5 before the pricing page.

Nothing before 2019, and nothing derived. No aggregated index, no computed metrics, no reference data beyond instrument specifications. Raw tape and the tools to replay it is the whole offer.

One thing that cuts the other way, and is rare enough to name: data already downloaded stays licensed to you permanently, including trial and sample data, and that survives the subscription ending.

Alternatives

Kaiko is the institutional version of this dataset — tick history back to 2010 — and nothing about it is self-serve, which is the practical difference: here you can buy a month with a card. Amberdata sits between the two, with a 600-dollar single-exchange plan and REST order-book history capped at 18 months.

CoinAPI is the cheaper cross-venue archive with a live stream attached, which this card does not sell at any price. Polygon.io Crypto is much cheaper still and has no crypto order book at all, so it is not a substitute for the thing people come here for.

A single venue's own archive — Binance API — is free and licensed for non-commercial use only, which is the trap this card exists to avoid.