Financial News and Sentiment APIs

Five kinds of reader arrive here, and they want different products sold under the same two words. If you want headlines for a list of tickers in a script, the field is cheap and crowded: TickerTick costs nothing, and Marketaux and finlight start at $29 a month. If you are putting news in front of your own users, the first question is not tagging or price but what your licence lets you display, and on most self-serve plans the answer is a headline and a link. If you want sentiment or event history to join against prices in a model, you are buying an archive and somebody's scoring method, and RavenPack News Analytics is the product here built for that and priced by contract. And if the thing reading the news is a language model, AskNews and Bigdata.com sell retrieval rather than a feed, under licences written for exactly that. If what you want is how loudly retail is talking about a ticker rather than what was written, that is Adanos, which returns numbers and no articles.

• Ticker-tagged US headlines for nothing — TickerTick, no key, ten requests a minute.
• A sentiment score per ticker rather than per article — Marketaux, free at 100 requests a day, then from $29.
• Companies resolved to ISIN and OpenFIGI, outside the US too — finlight, entities from $29.
• Wires, transcripts and US government feeds pushed over a websocket — NewsFilter.io from $65, after checking its SEC source.
• A label on every US item at the lowest paid price — Stock News API from $19.99.
• The licensed US newswire, display rights negotiated — Benzinga News API.
• Entity-level sentiment and event history for a quant model — RavenPack News Analytics.
• News to ground an LLM — AskNews with published rates, or Bigdata.com with premium news back to 2000.
• Articles clustered into events, no tickers — NewsAPI.ai.
• Global tone and theme series, free, mapping not included — GDELT.
• Retail chatter on Reddit, X, news and Polymarket as a buzz and sentiment number per ticker — Adanos, free for non-commercial use, then from $29; commercial use from $299.

Six products sold as "news API"

The listing below holds six different things, and a price comparison across them says nothing.

Ticker-tagged headline feeds. TickerTick, Marketaux, finlight, Stock News API and NewsFilter.io. A title, a link, a source, a timestamp and the tickers somebody's classifier matched, usually with a sentiment field on top. Self-serve, cheap, and almost never carrying the article itself.

The licensed newswire. Benzinga News API is the wire Benzinga's own site and terminal run on, sold to brokerages and anyone else putting US market news inside a product. What you are buying is the text and the right to show it, and both are on the order form.

An analytics dataset. RavenPack News Analytics emits a row per entity or event detection, with 80-plus fields, rather than an article. A factor model joins on the row; the text underneath is licensed to RavenPack by its publishers, not to you.

Retrieval for a language model. AskNews and Bigdata.com take a query and return passages ready for a context window, metered in credits and tokens. Neither is a feed you index yourself, and Bigdata.com's licence forbids you to try.

General news corpora. GDELT and NewsAPI.ai cover world news with no security identifiers in the schema: GDELT across 65 machine-translated languages for free, NewsAPI.ai across around 150,000 outlets with articles clustered into events. They offer breadth no finance vendor sells, and a mapping layer you build.

A social-attention score. Adanos reads Reddit, X, financial news and Polymarket and returns, for each ticker on each platform, a 0–100 buzz score for attention, a sentiment score from −1 to +1 with bullish and bearish shares, and a rising, falling or stable trend. It is not an article feed: below the $299 Professional plan you get the scores and the subreddits or publishers behind them, and raw per-post mentions start there. The sources it names are English-language, and its news data starts on 7 March 2026.

If news is one field among many rather than the whole requirement, it is usually cheaper as an endpoint on an API you already pay for. Finnhub puts a year of North American company news on its free key, EODHD includes news in its free tier, and Alpaca carries Benzinga's feed back to 2015 on its free data plan. Those are market data APIs first and are listed there; this category is for the products where the news is what you are paying for.

Who the story is about: tagged, resolved, or neither

Three words get used for this as if they were one, and the gap between them is most of the engineering.

Tagged means a ticker string is attached to a story because something in it matched. Stock News API returns the tickers mentioned; NewsFilter.io says its NLP tags each article with the symbols of the companies mentioned in it. Mentioned is a lower bar than about. TickerTick makes the difference a query choice: z:aapl is stories about Apple, tt:aapl a broader set, and one 150-story tt:aapl response on its card drew twelve items from Reddit.

Resolved means a company is mapped to a security identifier and a listing, with some measure of how sure the mapper is. finlight is the clearest case: every company in an article carries a confidence between 0 and 1, a ticker, an ISIN, an OpenFIGI identifier, a primary listing and every other listing it knows, each with its own exchange code, and you can query on those fields. Marketaux attaches a match_score for how strongly the article is about each entity rather than passing through it. Benzinga filters on ticker, ISIN and CUSIP, and the CUSIP filter needs a licence agreement of its own, because CUSIPs are somebody else's property. RavenPack claims 7.1 million companies behind a reference map of security symbols, and Bigdata.com resolves to knowledge-graph objects with their own identifiers.

Neither is three products here. GDELT records organisations as lowercased free text: one file on its card held softbank and softbank group as separate entries, beside data centers and united states. NewsAPI.ai's entities are Wikipedia concepts, so you query Apple by its URI rather than by AAPL. AskNews returns named-entity classes such as Person, Organization and Product, and its Finance category is a topic filter, not an instrument map. On all three the name-to-ticker map, the collisions on names like Apple, Delta, Gap and Visa, and the subsidiary rollup are yours to build and maintain.

Whichever kind you buy, the tag is a classifier's output. Marketaux publishes nothing about how its model works, and no card in this listing records a vendor publishing an accuracy figure for its tagging. Audit a sample before you trust a filter built on it. Why a ticker is the weakest of the available keys, and what to join on instead, is in CUSIP, ISIN and FIGI and symbology.

Headline, snippet, body: what you are allowed to show

Pin these down before reading a pricing page, because the vendors use them loosely. Internal use is your own analysis, on your own screens. Display is a person outside the team seeing the text. Redistribution is the data leaving your organisation at all, which is the right most plans here do not sell; the glossary entry has the general case.

Headline and link is the default. Stock News API says it does not index full article text, for copyright reasons, and makes compliance with each source's own terms the buyer's job. Marketaux serves "only a short snippet" with the link, even though its search runs over the full body; the text is indexed and not served. Benzinga's free Basic tier on AWS Data Exchange is headline, teaser and a link back.

The body is a negotiation. Benzinga's API will return the full article if you ask for it, and whether your product may show it depends on the licence you signed; the AWS listing names fully embeddable body content as a paid upgrade. RavenPack's premium sources, Dow Jones Newswires, the Wall Street Journal and Barron's among them, are licensed to RavenPack; assume showing that text is a separate negotiation with each publisher.

The terms say no in so many words. finlight licenses internal business or personal use and says it does not authorise republishing third-party content without the owner's licence; where you show anything, you name the publisher and link the article. NewsAPI.ai bars sharing, sublicensing or embedding third-party content and says it does not broker publishing rights. NewsFilter.io wants a written licence before any display beyond personal internal use. AskNews marks content rights "Limited" on every self-serve plan up to the $1,000 Analyst tier; redistribution and product use are Enterprise only. Adanos licenses its Free and Hobby plans for non-commercial use only; its $299 Professional plan lets you put scores inside your own application but forbids selling, sublicensing or redistributing them as a feed, and the posts and headlines behind them stay their platforms' and authors'.

Bigdata.com goes furthest. Its "Grounding Right" covers inference time only: you may keep what your model wrote, but may not store, cache or archive the content it read, pass it on, or train a model on it. That rules out building your own index from it, which is the usual reason to buy a news API in the first place.

Two cautions about the paper itself. Three vendors here publish terms that were plainly written for a website and never revised for the API they sell: Marketaux (January 2021), NewsFilter.io (September 2019) and AskNews (January 2024) all grant personal or non-commercial use on the public page while selling commercial plans beside it. Get commercial use in writing. And model training is a right of its own: Bigdata.com forbids it, and Benzinga sells training corpora as a separate product, which tells you it is not bundled. The one source here that grants redistribution outright is GDELT, which asks only for a citation and a link.

Sentiment: a column, a label, or the product

The word covers at least five different objects, and a number from one cannot stand in for a number from another.

Per entity. Marketaux scores each ticker inside an article from -1 to +1, averaged over the passages where it matched, so a Ford-versus-Tesla piece returns two scores and the article has none. RavenPack scores each detected entity too, with more than 20 sentiment indicators per detection and a score even when no event fires.

Per article. finlight returns positive, neutral or negative with a separate confidence, from the $99 plan up and stripped from the payload below it. NewsAPI.ai scores the article, so a comparison piece gets one number for both companies. AskNews returns an integer with no published scale or model description.

Per chunk. Bigdata.com scores each retrieved passage from -1.00 to 1.00, and its docs say the sentiment model's training data stops in 2023.

Per ticker, per platform. Adanos aggregates posts into one sentiment score per ticker on each of Reddit, X, news and Polymarket, from −1 to +1, and reports attention separately as a 0–100 buzz score. The trend label compares the last three days of activity with the three before, and the documentation says the share price plays no part in any of it. The vendor's own whitepaper, over 198 S&P 500 stocks for twelve months, found buzz forecasts next-day volatility weakly and a change in buzz does not predict the sign of the next day's return — its words, an early-warning signal for magnitude, not a directional alpha source.

By keyword. Stock News API labels each item from its title and sub-title by keyword analysis, calls anything unclear neutral, and derives a window aggregate from -1.5 to +1.5 out of the counts. The vendor says so plainly, which is more than most do.

Then there is the case where the score is the product rather than a column on it. RavenPack News Analytics is sentiment, relevance, novelty and more than 7,000 event categories, tagged per entity across 40,000 news and social sources, and the article is incidental. GDELT's tone vectors are the other end: general-purpose affect scored over whole documents in a corpus that is mostly not about markets. TickerTick computes no sentiment at all.

None of these is a signal or a recommendation, and this page does not say what to do with one. What it does say is that the definition changes with the vendor, so a series cannot be backfilled from a second source, pooled across two, or carried over a vendor switch without changing what it measures.

Push, poll, and what real-time means here

On a news API, real-time is indexing delay: the time from a story's publication to its appearance in your response. No card in this listing records a vendor contracting on it, and the claims are marketing: NewsFilter.io says under 500 milliseconds; Benzinga's marketing page says under 0.1 seconds while its own docs say the feed "is updated every few minutes"; finlight claims sub-second websocket latency with no indexing figure in the docs; RavenPack says "low latency" and stops there. The SLA figures that do exist, NewsFilter.io's 99.95% uptime at $65 and a 99.9% that AskNews claims, put no number on delay either. The free tiers are slowed on purpose: finlight holds articles back 12 hours, NewsFilter.io one hour.

Push is rarer than the feature lists suggest. Benzinga delivers over REST, a persistent TCP connection, a WebSocket and a webhook engine. finlight has two websockets and signed webhooks from $29, metered separately from requests, and when the webhook quota runs out deliveries pause until the period rolls. NewsFilter.io's websocket, the reason to choose it, starts at $65. AskNews sells natural-language alerts over news, X and Telegram. Bigdata.com documents a Monitors API and marks it coming soon, which should be read as not yet.

Everyone else polls. Marketaux, NewsAPI.ai, TickerTick and Adanos are request-response only, and Stock News API's alerts endpoint is a feed you poll, not an alert that reaches you. GDELT publishes files every 15 minutes and asks for one API request every five seconds.

Archive depth, and what it costs to reach back

The dates the cards record: Bigdata.com's premium news from 2000 (its public web news is a rolling five years); RavenPack "20+ years" with no first date; Benzinga's newswire from 2010 on the product page and datasets since 2009 on the API home page; NewsAPI.ai from 2014; GDELT's 2.0 files from February 2015; Stock News API from February or March 2019, depending on which of its pages you read, and only on Premium; AskNews from 2023. NewsFilter.io sells one month, one year and four years by tier, and Enterprise buys more requests but still four years. Adanos sells 30, 90 and up to 365 days by plan, but its news data starts on 7 March 2026, so the longest window reaches past the archive. finlight gives one month on its lower two plans and says nothing for the upper two. Marketaux publishes no depth at all.

For a backtest the start date is only half of it. What you need is the archive as it stood, not as it was later corrected, which is the point-in-time question. AskNews builds its historical mode around it, taking a start and end timestamp to reconstruct what was knowable on a date, and RavenPack claims its archive is point-in-time. Adanos says the opposite in its terms: values may be revised when late items arrive, filters or mappings are corrected, or models improve, so store what you pull. For everyone else, ask.

Reaching back is often priced or capped separately from the archive itself. NewsAPI.ai charges 5 tokens per year searched, so a decade-wide query costs 50 and its $90 plan buys 180 of them. Marketaux caps a query at 20,000 results; Benzinga's quickstart caps a result set at 10,000, so slice history by date rather than by deep paging; a Stock News API Basic key stops at 500 items. TickerTick returns at most 150 stories a request, so its depth depends on coverage: nine hours for Apple, months for a quiet retailer. Two products publish bulk history instead: TickerTick's GitHub release of roughly 16 million stories, last dated May 2025, and GDELT's files and BigQuery tables, where Google bills $6.25 per TiB queried after the first free TiB each month.

What free actually covers

• TickerTick — the whole API, no key, ten requests a minute asked for, commercial use allowed, and no terms of service, SLA or status page behind it.
• GDELT — every API and file, for any use, at one request every five seconds. The only bill is Google's if you query BigQuery.
• Marketaux — 100 requests a day at three articles each, about 300 articles, with no Market Stats endpoints.
• finlight — 5,000 requests a month, 12 hours late, one month of history, and no company entities or sentiment.
• NewsFilter.io — 100 calls a day at five articles, one hour late, one month back. An issue open since June 2024 reports the free key cannot be generated.
• NewsAPI.ai — 2,000 tokens once, never renewed, last 30 days only, evaluation use only, and a company or academic email to sign up.
• AskNews — pay as you go at $0 a month with 25 credits and some tokens included, and a card required to start.
• Bigdata.com — free credits on signup, amount unpublished.
• Adanos — 250 requests a month, 30 days of history, no card, non-commercial only, and no raw mentions. Hobby at $29 is still non-commercial.

Three have no free tier. Stock News API has a five-day, 100-call trial that bills the card on file unless you cancel. Benzinga grants a trial on request and lists a fee-free Basic tier on AWS Data Exchange as S3 objects, not as an API key. RavenPack has a trial form that refuses a personal email address.

What the money looks like, and what "priced by contract" means

The meter differs more than the price does. Marketaux and NewsFilter.io count requests per day; finlight, Stock News API and Adanos per month. NewsAPI.ai sells tokens from $90 for 5,000 to $3,000 for 500,000 a month, spent by how far back each query reaches. AskNews runs two meters, credits for actions and tokens for the text moved, with plans at $7.99, $250 and $1,000 that buy a lower rate as much as a larger allowance. Bigdata.com bills per token at a rate shown only inside an account, and publishes worked examples of $0.57 to $1.82 per agent run instead.

Read the feature rows, not the volume, because that is where the tiers differ. finlight's company entities start at $29 and sentiment at $99. Marketaux's Market Stats endpoints start at $49. NewsFilter.io's websocket starts at $65. Stock News API's history sits in the $49.99 Premium column. AskNews keeps premium paywalled sources and its entity-relation graph for the $1,000 plan. Two annual toggles also misstate themselves: Marketaux's "20%" and NewsFilter.io's "10%" both work out nearer 17%.

Priced by contract means more than "call us". On Benzinga and RavenPack there is no price list, no public licence for the feed, and in RavenPack's case no public documentation; Benzinga scopes each key to the datasets you bought and answers a call outside them with a 403. You cannot size the workload, read the redistribution clause or see the response shape before sales has your name, and the order form is the licence. The same holds one level down on the self-serve vendors: AskNews's Enterprise tier is the only one with commercial redistribution, and NewsFilter.io's starts at $700 a month and still stops at four years of history. A quote usually means the licence is what is being priced, not the volume.

Where this category connects

News is usually one input among several, and the rest are bought elsewhere. Prices, bars and fundamentals are market data APIs, several of which carry a news endpoint of their own. AskNews, Bigdata.com, finlight and NewsAPI.ai ship MCP servers, covered with the rest in financial MCP servers; Benzinga's MCP server searches its documentation and carries no news. Filings and transcripts to read rather than to ingest are fundamentals and research platforms, and Form 4 and 13F filings as data are insider, 13F and congressional trade trackers. For the working version of the cheap end, with code, see how to get news headlines as data.