Switching data providers after launch is painful. Ask these ten questions before you choose a market data API for your product.
- Coverage: does it include every asset class you need (forex, stocks, indices, metals, crypto)? Check the symbol list, not the marketing page.
- Freshness: how fast do prices update, and does each quote show its timestamp and status?
- History: how many years, which timeframes, and are ticks available?
- Time conventions: are candles aligned to a documented trading day and returned in UTC?
- Streaming: is there a WebSocket stream for live use cases?
- Reliability: are there status pages, monitoring and clear error codes?
- Pricing model: pay as you go, monthly plans, or both? Are free credits available for testing?
- Limits: rate limits, and what happens when you exceed them.
- Licensing: may you display or redistribute the data in your product?
- Support and documentation: real examples, versioned endpoints, responsive help.
Run a one-day trial
Pick three symbols you care about, download a month of history, stream live prices for an hour and compare against your broker. You will learn more than from any feature table.
Red flags
- No timestamps on quotes, or no way to tell live prices from stale ones.
- A symbol list you can only see after paying.
- Undocumented changes to response formats.
- Pricing that punishes growth with sudden jumps between tiers.
Questions to ask support
How do you handle market closures? What happens when your source fails? How quickly are incidents communicated? Good providers answer clearly and in writing.
One provider or several?
Many teams start with one provider and add a second source later for redundancy. Platforms that aggregate several sources and serve a median price reduce the impact of any single bad feed.
MarketAPI answers these with a public documentation, a downloadable symbol list, a free tier and transparent pricing.
