Prompt
Need financial data API with real-time and historical prices
Latest observation
Oct 8, 2026
OpenAI APIWeb search: off
If you need a financial data API that provides both real-time and historical prices, here are the main options to consider:
Good API providers
1. Polygon.io
- Real-time and historical market data
- Stocks, options, forex, crypto
- Strong developer tooling
- Good for U.S. markets
- Paid plans can get expensive
2. Finnhub
- Real-time quotes
- Historical OHLC data
- Stocks, forex, crypto, fundamentals, news
- Good balance of features and price
- Easy to get started
3. Alpha Vantage
- Historical prices and intraday data
- Also supports forex and crypto
- Free tier available, but rate-limited
- Good for prototypes and smaller apps
4. IEX Cloud
- Real-time-ish U.S. stock data depending on plan/source
- Historical data available
- Good documentation
- Plan structure can be confusing
5. Tiingo
- Historical and intraday equities data
- Crypto and news options
- Clean API and solid data quality
- Good for research and apps
6. Twelve Data
- Stocks, forex, crypto, ETFs, indices
- Real-time and historical data
- Broad coverage
- Reasonable for multi-asset use cases
What to check before choosing
- Asset classes: stocks only, or also forex/crypto/options?
- Latency: true real-time vs delayed quotes
- Historical depth: intraday, daily, tick-level, how many years?
- Market coverage: U.S. only or global?
- Rate limits and pricing
- Licensing for production use
Quick recommendation
- Best overall for developers: Polygon.io
- Best value / broad feature set: Finnhub
- Best free starter option: Alpha Vantage
- Best for multi-asset coverage: Twelve Data
If you want, I can also give you:
- a comparison table,
- a recommended API based on your use case, or
- sample code for fetching real-time and historical prices.