# How to get earnings call transcripts as data

There is no free public source of earnings-call transcripts. Which APIs sell them, how fast they land, and the licence terms that decide what you may build.

*https://stockmarketstack.com/how-to/get-earnings-call-transcripts-as-data · next to Fundamental Data & Stock Research Platforms*

**Answer:** Earnings-call transcripts are not filed with any regulator, so there is no free public source to download: every machine-readable transcript is a vendor's product under that vendor's licence. A fundamentals API sells them by company and fiscal quarter for $29 to $149 a month; a specialist delivers them within an hour of the call, then again with speakers named. The licence, not the endpoint, decides whether you may store, display or train on the text.

## The tools that do this

*In the order this page recommends trying them. Paid placement does not affect this order.*

1. [Financial Modeling Prep](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/financial-modeling-prep.md) — Transcripts by symbol, fiscal year and quarter beside statements and prices, on the $149-a-month Ultimate tier. Display or redistribution is Enterprise-only.
2. [Quartr API](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/quartr-api.md) — Raw transcripts within 45 minutes of the call for 95% of events, edited ones with named speakers hours later, plus audio. English only, contract-priced.
3. [ROIC.ai](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/roic-ai.md) — Call transcripts beside forty years of statements. API history is capped by plan — five years at $29, all of it at $89 — and commercial use is Enterprise-only.
4. [Bigdata.com](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/bigdata-com.md) — Transcripts searched at inference time for grounding a model, billed per token. The terms bar storing or caching the text you retrieve.

## The short way

A call is keyed by company and *fiscal* quarter, so ask the vendor which quarters it holds before
asking for one. With [Financial Modeling Prep](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/financial-modeling-prep) on a tier that
carries transcripts:

```python
import json, urllib.request

KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY"
BASE = "https://financialmodelingprep.com/stable"

def get(path):
    with urllib.request.urlopen(f"{BASE}/{path}&apikey={KEY}") as r:
        return json.loads(r.read())

# which fiscal year and quarter pairs exist for this symbol, and on what dates
dates = get("earning-call-transcript-dates?symbol=AAPL")
print(json.dumps(dates[:3], indent=2))

# then one call, by the fiscal pair the list returned — not by calendar quarter
call = get("earning-call-transcript?symbol=AAPL&year=2025&quarter=3")
print(json.dumps(call, indent=2)[:1500])
```

Two endpoints sit beside those and are worth knowing before you build a loop:
`earnings-transcript-list` returns every symbol that has transcripts at all, which is how you
find out whether your universe is covered before paying for the tier, and
`earning-call-transcript-latest` returns what was added most recently, which is cheaper to poll
than walking every company. Store the raw response with the date you fetched it, because a
transcript you fetched today can be corrected tomorrow.

## What the options are

**Beside the fundamentals.** [Financial Modeling Prep](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/financial-modeling-prep) puts
transcripts on its Ultimate tier, $149 a month billed annually, together with global coverage,
ETF holdings and bulk delivery — so if the transcript is one input in a model built on
statements, it is the same key and the same integration. [ROIC.ai](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/roic-ai) claims
seventeen-plus years of call transcripts beside forty years of statements, updated daily; its API
history is capped by plan, at two years free, five on the $29 Individual plan and all of it on
the $89 Professional one. On both, the published plans are for your own use: display or redistribution is the
quote-only Enterprise tier.

**Built for the call itself.** [Quartr API](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/quartr-api) is the specialist: live audio, a
live transcript streamed as JSON Lines with per-word timings, a raw transcript after the call, an
edited one with speakers named, and the slide deck and report from the same event, across
16,000-plus companies. Delivery is REST, signed webhooks or a Snowflake share, and its delivery
times are written into the contract. Pricing is quote-only, and internal use and redistribution
are two different sets of terms rather than two sizes of one plan.

**Retrieved, not stored.** [Bigdata.com](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/bigdata-com) searches premium news, filings and
transcripts to ground a language model and bills per token. Its terms grant a grounding right
for inference time only: you may keep what your model produced, not the content it read. That
is the right shape for an assistant answering a question about last night's call, and the wrong
one for building a corpus.

**To read rather than to parse.** Several research terminals display transcripts without
selling them as data. [Fiscal.ai](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/fiscal-ai) serves them through its API and MCP server
too, but its transcript history there starts with each company's latest period as of 7 July
2026, which makes it a feed going forward rather than an archive. The rest of the shelf is in
[fundamentals and research](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/fundamentals-research).

## Where this breaks

**There is no public original to fall back on.** A 10-K has one canonical copy on EDGAR, and
every vendor's version can be checked against it. An earnings call has none: the company owns
the recording, each transcription is that vendor's own work, and two vendors' texts of the same
call differ in punctuation, in what they mark as inaudible and in where they break paragraphs.
Switch vendors partway through a series and the text changes for reasons that have nothing to
do with what anyone said. Pick one source per series, and keep the vendor in the key.

**The licence is the product.** Quartr's 2026 internal-use terms let work derived from its data
leave your firm only if it is a meaningful transformation, no continuous verbatim excerpt from
one document exceeds 250 words, and verbatim material is no more than 20% of the total. The same
terms prohibit training, fine-tuning or evaluating any AI model on the data, and systematically
caching it to build a dataset. Redistribution is a separate contract that names the one product
the data may appear in. Financial Modeling Prep and ROIC.ai keep display and commercial use on
Enterprise. A side project that shows transcripts on a public page is a redistribution licence
before it is an engineering problem.

**Speakers arrive later, and some never do.** Quartr publishes transcripts in two steps: a raw
transcript with paragraph breaks shortly after the call, and an edited one once speaker
identification is done, with names, roles and companies. During earnings season some events are
attributed sooner than others according to client interest. Name, role and company can all be
null when a speaker is not clearly identified or not on the official roster, and older
transcripts are never retrofitted with speaker data. Anything that separates management's
prepared remarks from the analysts' questions — the most common thing people want from a
transcript — depends on a field that may not be there.

**The first version is not the last.** The raw transcript is a machine pass; the edited one
replaces it hours later, and Quartr sends webhooks for a transcript being created, updated and
deleted. A pipeline that ingests the first version and never listens again keeps the
transcription errors and the missing speakers forever. Store versions, and treat an update
event as a replacement rather than a new document.

**Fiscal quarters are not calendar quarters.** Transcripts are indexed by the company's fiscal
year and quarter. Apple's fiscal year ends in late September, so its "Q3 2025" call is about the
quarter that ended in June. Ask for calendar Q3 across a universe and you get a mix of quarters
that ended in different months. Resolve each company through its dates endpoint, and join on
the call date or the period end rather than on the label.

**Coverage thins exactly where the information is.** Large caps are transcribed by everyone;
small caps, recent listings and companies that hold calls only some quarters are where vendors
differ. Quartr transcribes only events conducted in English, a large hole in a product that
covers 65 markets. Check your universe against the vendor's symbol list before you commit, and
count the calls missing per quarter rather than the companies covered.

**Fast is a percentile, not a promise.** Quartr's contractual SLA is a transcript for 95% of
events within 45 minutes of the call ending and edited transcripts within a couple of hours. The
other 5% is not a rounding error if your event is in it. A vendor that updates daily can lag a
full day. If the use is reacting to the call while it happens, only a live transcript does
that, and it is a different dataset at a different price.

## If you outgrow this

**When you need the call as it happens**, that is Quartr's live dataset — audio and a streamed
transcript, transcribed within five seconds of event start for 90% of events under its SLA —
from the same vendor and the same API as the archive.

**When what you want is the numbers said on the call**, transcripts are the slow way to get
them. [Daloopa](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/daloopa) extracts KPIs and guidance from filings, decks and selected
transcripts into a model, each figure linked to its source page.

**When you want the date of the next call rather than the text of the last one**, see
[How to get an earnings calendar as data](https://stockmarketstack.com/how-to/get-an-earnings-calendar-as-data).

## FAQ

### Is there a free source of earnings call transcripts?

Not as data. A company's call is not a filing, so EDGAR does not hold it unless the company chooses to furnish a transcript, and the transcripts most sites show are licensed from a vendor. Free web terminals display them to read; the APIs that return them as text are paid, and the cheaper plans license the text for personal or internal use only.

### How soon after a call is the transcript available?

It depends on the vendor and the version. Quartr's contractual SLA is a raw transcript for 95% of events within 45 minutes of the call ending and an edited transcript, with speakers named, within a couple of hours. A fundamentals API that updates daily can lag a day. Neither version is final until the vendor stops sending updates to it.

### Can I train a model on earnings call transcripts I licensed?

Read the contract before the endpoint. Quartr's 2026 API terms prohibit using its data to train, fine-tune or evaluate any AI model, and prohibit systematically caching it to build a dataset. Bigdata.com licenses retrieval at inference time only. Plans sold for personal or internal use generally do not stretch to a model you then offer to anyone else.

## Sources

1. [Quartr API — Data overview and delivery SLAs](https://quartr.com/docs/data-overview) — Quartr, read 2026-10-04
2. [Quartr API — Backlog transcripts](https://quartr.com/docs/datasets/earnings-call-transcripts) — Quartr, read 2026-10-04
3. [Quartr API Subscription Terms — US, internal use (2026)](https://a.storyblok.com/f/182663/x/2bdb9a55bd/quartr-api-subscription-terms-us-internal-2026.pdf) — Quartr, read 2026-10-04
4. [Earnings Transcript API](https://site.financialmodelingprep.com/developer/docs/stable/search-transcripts) — Financial Modeling Prep, read 2026-10-04
5. [Transcripts Dates By Symbol API](https://site.financialmodelingprep.com/developer/docs/stable/transcripts-dates-by-symbol) — Financial Modeling Prep, read 2026-10-04

*Last updated 2026-10-04. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*