# What to use instead of the Yahoo Finance API There has been no official Yahoo Finance API since 2017. What to use when a script that scrapes it has to become something you can ship. *https://stockmarketstack.com/alternatives/yahoo-finance-api* ## The subject | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | Product | Yahoo Finance API | | Status | restricted | | Website | https://finance.yahoo.com | | Category | Stock Market Data APIs | There is no official Yahoo Finance API and has not been one since 2017 — what people call by that name is a set of undocumented endpoints behind the website, read without a licence. ## Replacements *Ordered by how little work the switch takes, least first. Paid placement does not affect this order.* 1. [Alpha Vantage](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/alpha-vantage.md) — The shortest path off a scraper. Free key, no card, wide coverage, and rate limits hard enough that you find out immediately what your call volume really is. 2. [EODHD](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/eodhd.md) — The closest match for what people actually pull from Yahoo — end-of-day prices and fundamentals for 60-plus exchanges worldwide, from 19.99 dollars a month. 3. [Marketstack](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/marketstack.md) — Cheap worldwide end-of-day bars over plain JSON with a free tier, if prices are all you were taking and the budget is the binding constraint. 4. [Tiingo](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/tiingo.md) — End-of-day equity history back to 1962 with a licence attached, for research that needs more history than Yahoo reliably returns. 5. [Financial Modeling Prep](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/financial-modeling-prep.md) — Statements, ratios and filings across 60-plus exchanges, for the half of Yahoo scraping that was never about prices at all. ## The product There is no Yahoo Finance API. There has not been one since 2017, when the end-of-day CSV download endpoint was switched off in May and the YQL-based APIs were retired that November. What carries the name today is a set of endpoints Yahoo's own website calls to render its pages. They are undocumented, unversioned and ungoverned by any terms that grant you the data, and they are read by a large ecosystem of libraries — [yfinance](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/yfinance) most of all — that exist to keep up with them as they change. This catalogue lists yfinance, and the card says the same thing its maintainer does: superb for research on your own machine, wrong as a foundation for anything a user depends on. ## What to use instead The order on this page is by how little work the switch is, because the people who land here are usually not choosing a data strategy — they are fixing a job that broke this morning. [Alpha Vantage](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/alpha-vantage) is the shortest path: a free key, no card, and coverage wide enough that most scripts port in an afternoon. Its rate limits are the strictest on this list, which is useful information rather than only a constraint — it tells you in the first hour what your actual call volume is. From there the question is what you were really taking. Prices worldwide, cheaply, point at [Marketstack](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/marketstack) and [EODHD](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/eodhd). Statements and ratios point at [Financial Modeling Prep](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/financial-modeling-prep). Long history points at [Tiingo](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/tiingo). ## What you give up **Free.** That is the honest headline, and everything below it is the argument for paying. Every provider here has a free tier, none of them is as unlimited as an endpoint nobody is metering because nobody agreed you could call it. **One library for everything.** yfinance returns prices, fundamentals, options chains, earnings dates and news through one object. No single licensed provider on this list does all of that at a comparable price, and assembling the equivalent is the real cost of the move. ## Migration notes The adjustment convention is the trap. Yahoo's adjusted close folds in dividends and splits in a particular way, and a backtest whose results you trust was tuned against that series. Providers differ here, several offer both adjusted and unadjusted, and the same strategy will produce different numbers on the same tickers. Re-run a known result before trusting a new one. Second, the symbol suffixes are Yahoo's own. Non-US listings carry exchange suffixes in a format nobody else uses, and any stored data keyed on them needs a mapping table rather than a string replace. ## FAQ ### Is there an official Yahoo Finance API? No. The historical-data download endpoint was switched off in May 2017 and the YQL-based APIs were retired later that year. Everything published since under the name Yahoo Finance API is either a third-party service that resells scraped data or a client library for the undocumented endpoints the website itself calls. ### Is using yfinance against the rules? It reads endpoints Yahoo publishes for its own site, not a documented API with a contract behind it, and nothing in Yahoo's terms grants you a licence to the data that comes back. Its own maintainer says it is for research and personal use. For a notebook on your own machine that is a reasonable risk. For anything with users it is the wrong foundation, and the risk is not only that it breaks. ### Why does my Yahoo scraper keep breaking? Because there is no contract to hold it stable. Endpoint paths change, authentication tokens appear, rate limiting tightens and response shapes shift, all without notice, because none of it was ever published as an interface. Every fix is a re-reverse-engineering, and the library you rely on has to ship a release before your job runs again. ### What is the cheapest licensed replacement? Alpha Vantage's free key for a script that can live inside 25 requests a day, and Marketstack's paid entry tier if end-of-day prices are all you need. Both are genuinely licensed rather than tolerated, which is the whole difference being paid for at that price.