Alpha Vantage

What it is

Alpha Vantage is where most people's first data script points: a free key comes straight back from a form on the support page, the REST responses are JSON or CSV, and technical indicators are computed server-side so a beginner never has to implement an RSI. Coverage runs well past the US — global equities, forex, crypto and commodities — which is rare at the price.

What you are buying, on any tier, is convenience rather than depth. The licence is personal and non-commercial by default: anything that puts the data in front of other people is commercial use and needs a separate agreement with the vendor. Nothing in the documented API hands you a flat file either — every response comes one request at a time.

Pricing

The free key is 25 requests a day, with verified open-source and educational projects exempt from that cap. Paid plans are a ladder of request rates — $49.99/month for 75 a minute up to $249.99 for 1,200, two months off on annual billing — but throughput is not all that separates them. The $49.99 plan carries 15-minute delayed US market data and end-of-day options; realtime US market data starts at $99.99 and realtime options at $199.99. Any premium key also unlocks the endpoints a free key cannot call at all — on 8 October 2026 the documentation marked intraday, adjusted daily, index, options, news and the company overview Premium, the last of which is where most fundamentals scripts start.

Data & coverage

Global equities, forex, crypto, commodities and economic series, with 25+ years of daily history. Freshness is a separate purchase from coverage: with no entitlement requested the API answers end-of-day, and the delayed and realtime entitlements are sold for the US market. Outside the US the vendor advertises global equity coverage without publishing an exchange list, so check your tickers against the free symbol search endpoint first.

Integrations

Alpha Vantage ships no client library of its own. The documentation carries copy-paste samples in Python, Node.js, PHP and C#/.NET and then points at a GitHub search; the vendor counts over 1,000 community libraries across 20-plus languages, and the familiar alpha_vantage package on PyPI is one of those, published by Romel Torres rather than by the vendor.

What is first-party is the spreadsheet pair and the MCP server. The Office 365 Excel add-in installs from Microsoft's own store, adds an Alpha Vantage (Web) ribbon tab and a function namespace of the same name, and needs a Microsoft 365 subscription or a recent perpetual Office; the Google Sheets add-on installs from the Workspace Marketplace and prefixes every function AV. Both are free and both take the key in a task pane. The vendor's own Sheets documentation warns that a bulk pull runs into Google's quotas rather than Alpha Vantage's, and that Sheets cannot be recalculated by hand.

The MCP server is remote at mcp.alphavantage.co/mcp over OAuth — you authorise the key on a page instead of pasting it into the URL, which is the deprecated legacy form — and is listed in Claude's connector directory, ChatGPT's app directory and Azure AI Foundry's tool catalogue. Each tool is one API endpoint, across the same eleven groups as the REST docs. Run it locally with uvx marketdata-mcp-server, which is the vendor's own package; alphavantage-mcp on PyPI — the name a reader would guess, and at a higher version number — belongs to somebody else.

Limitations

• Realtime is US-only and starts at $99.99/month; the $49.99 plan stops at 15-minute delayed.
• A free key cannot call intraday (stock, forex or crypto), split/dividend-adjusted daily, index or options endpoints at all, and gets only the latest 100 daily bars — outputsize=full is premium. (Weekly and monthly series do come back in full.) The corporate actions themselves are not premium: DIVIDENDS, declared ones included, and SPLITS both answer on a free key, so a free script can rebuild the adjustment the adjusted endpoint withholds (split and dividend history as data).
• OVERVIEW — the company overview carrying the valuation ratios, DividendYield, DividendPerShare and ExDividendDate — is marked Premium in the documentation as of 8 October 2026, as are Market News & Sentiment, realtime bulk quotes and the VWAP and MACD indicators. The statements are still free: INCOME_STATEMENT, BALANCE_SHEET, CASH_FLOW, EARNINGS, EARNINGS_ESTIMATES, SHARES_OUTSTANDING and ETF_PROFILE carry no Premium mark, so a free key gets fundamentals but has to compute its own ratios and yield.
• 25 requests a day is smaller than most tutorials assume; the per-minute rates on the price list are what a paid key buys, and the free key has no published burst allowance at all.
• The licence is personal and non-commercial; commercial use is a separate agreement.

Alternatives

For real-time US data see Massive (formerly Polygon.io); for non-US coverage with more depth, the rest of the market data category.