About StockMarketStack

A catalogue of the software and data that people use to manage their own money — what it costs, what the free tier allows and what it actually covers, in the same blocks on every card.

What is catalogued

21 categories, each opened once there was enough in it to be worth reading end to end:

Every card in every category also sits in one flat, filterable list of all tools; the ones that speak MCP are collected separately under tools with MCP.

A category answers “what is this bought for”. The collections cut the same catalogue the other way, by a property that runs across every category — open source, self-hosted, real-time, spreadsheets, screeners, options, futures, forex, backtesting, ai — so a reader who has already decided how a tool must run can start there instead. A card’s home stays its category; a collection is a selection, not a second address.

Some products are deliberately not catalogued at all, and what to use instead is for the reader holding one of them: 46 pages on products that shut down, priced themselves out of reach, or closed the terms you were building on, each listing what in here replaces it.

And some of what stops a reader is not a product at all. The guides are 40 reference pages on how the industry works — what an exchange charges for its own prices, who owns the identifier on a security, what an index licence covers — each claim carrying the document it came from. They are corrected in place rather than dated, and they recommend nothing.

Where a guide explains and recommends nothing, how to does the opposite: 45 pages that each take one task — pull price history, get an options chain, stream live quotes — and name the handful of cards that do it, in an order, with the reason beside each. Every one of them carries a section on what breaks, which is the part no vendor’s own page will tell you.

Where the boundary runs

By product type, not audience. Inside: programs, data, APIs, libraries. Outside: brokers, robo-advisors, paid picks and idea newsletters. That is a deliberate choice to stay out of advice and stay in tools.

The unit is a product, not a company. One vendor can appear more than once — a web terminal and the API behind it have different prices, different buyers and different competitors, so each gets its own card rather than one entry that describes neither.

How a card is made

Every card fills in the same blocks, whatever its category, and each block carries its own verification date — pricing goes stale in weeks, asset coverage in years. A field nobody checked is left blank rather than guessed. The methodology page covers what tested hands-on means here and how sponsorship and affiliate links are handled; the affiliate disclosure covers the links themselves.

Three catalogues, one author

The same person builds two more catalogues on the same plan, for two markets this one does not cover: CryptoMarkets.tools for crypto trading and market data, and PredictionMarkets.tools for prediction markets and event contracts.

They are separate sites rather than sections of this one because the reader is different. What decides a crypto purchase is funding rates, exchange terms and whether a backtester knows what a perpetual is; what decides one here is exchange display fees, adjusted closes and survivorship bias. A card written to serve both would answer neither well, and a listing holding both would be a listing nobody can scan.

A handful of products are bought for two of those markets, and those cards say so and link across: the TradingView card here is about equities, and points at the crypto one for the part it does not cover. Nothing else is shared between the three sites except the software that renders them.

Browse all toolsHow cards are made

Nothing here is investment advice — this site describes tools, not what to do with them.