Alpha Vantage
by Alpha Vantage Inc. · API service
REST API for stock, ETF, options, forex, crypto, commodity and economic data plus fundamentals, news sentiment and technical indicators, with a free key tier and premium plans
Overview
Alpha Vantage is a REST market-data API from Alpha Vantage Inc. It serves daily, weekly, monthly and intraday time series for stocks and ETFs, options data, index data, fundamentals (statements, earnings), forex and cryptocurrency rates, commodities, economic indicators, more than fifty technical indicators and an "Alpha Intelligence" family covering news sentiment, earnings transcripts and insider activity. Responses are JSON by default with CSV available on most endpoints, every call carries an API key, and the company also publishes an MCP server for AI agents and spreadsheet access.
The free key covers most endpoints within a daily request allowance; premium subscriptions scale by requests per minute and are billed monthly or annually, with enterprise arrangements for higher throughput. The terms of service restrict standard use to personal, non-commercial purposes and define redistribution to third parties or use inside commercial products as commercial use requiring a separate agreement. Alpha Vantage is popular for prototypes and teaching because of the free tier, but rate limits, daily history truncation on free keys and the licence boundary make it less suited to production or redistribution.
Capabilities
- Daily, weekly, monthly and intraday stock and ETF series
- Options, index, forex, crypto and commodity data
- Fundamentals and earnings
- News sentiment and other Alpha Intelligence endpoints
- Technical indicators
- JSON and CSV output
- MCP server for AI agents
Typical workflows
- Prototyping a dashboard with a free key
- Teaching API consumption in a finance course
Strengths
- Free tier covering most endpoints
- Simple REST interface
- Broad asset and indicator coverage
Limitations
- Daily and per-minute request limits by plan
- Standard terms are personal, non-commercial
- Redistribution requires a commercial agreement
Prerequisites
- Free API key
Who it is for
- Students and hobbyist developers
- Analysts prototyping data pipelines
Alternatives & comparison
yfinance is free but unofficial; Massive and Databento are paid professional APIs with tick-level depth; FRED covers economic series only. Alpha Vantage's niche is a licensed free tier with broad but rate-limited coverage.
- Databento
Usage-priced market data platform with normalized order-book (MBO/MBP), trades, OHLCV and reference schemas for futures, options and equities, delivered via historical, live and batch APIs in the DBN format
MixedUsage-based - FirstRate Data
Vendor of historical intraday market data (1-minute to daily bars, tick and options) for US stocks, ETFs, futures, indices, crypto and FX, delivered as zipped CSV bundles under a perpetual licence
ProprietaryPaid - FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)
Free economic database from the St. Louis Fed aggregating hundreds of thousands of US and international time series, with graphs, vintages (ALFRED), an Excel add-in and a keyed JSON/XML API
ProprietaryFree - Massive (formerly Polygon.io)
Market data platform (renamed from Polygon.io in October 2025) with REST and WebSocket APIs, flat files and SQL access for US stocks, options, indices, forex, crypto and futures
ProprietaryPaid - Nasdaq Data Link
Nasdaq's marketplace for financial, economic and alternative datasets (formerly Quandl) with a REST API, time-series and table endpoints and Python, R and Excel clients
ProprietaryFreemium - yfinance
Open-source Python library that downloads price history, fundamentals, options chains and fund data from Yahoo Finance's unofficial endpoints for research and education
Open sourceFree
Sources & verification
Primary sources consulted for this record. Claims are tied to the fields each source supports; the automated link checker re-verifies every URL on a schedule.
- Official documentationAlpha Vantage API Documentationchecked Nov 1, 2026
https://www.alphavantage.co/documentation
Supports: capabilities, data_formats, pricing_model
- Official siteAlpha Vantage: Free Stock APIs in JSON & Excelchecked Nov 1, 2026
https://www.alphavantage.co/
Supports: name, summary, capabilities, vendor
- Policy pageAlpha Vantage Terms of Service (PDF)checked Nov 1, 2026
https://www.alphavantage.co/terms_of_service
Supports: limitations, description
Personal, non-commercial use by default; redistribution counts as commercial use
- Pricing pagechecked Nov 1, 2026
- Confidence
- High
- Reviewed
- Nov 1, 2026
- Links
- Verified · Nov 2, 2026
Spotted an error?
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