Benzinga News API

What it is

The licensed half of Benzinga: the newswire its own site and terminal run on, sold as a feed to brokerages, aggregators and anyone putting US market news inside their own product. The company markets it as the largest news vendor to North American brokerages.

It is not one API. The vendor's suite page groups the catalogue as newswire and article APIs, mission-critical datasets and logos, and links about thirty product pages; the site's own product sitemap carries about fifty. You licence the ones you need, and keys are scoped to what you bought: the docs say a valid key hitting an endpoint outside your plan gets a 403 and a note to contact sales.

Pricing

Nothing is published, and there is no pricing page to read — the API site's sitemap offers a trial-request form and a contact form where a price list would be. The docs quickstart tells you to email licensing or call the sales line and promises a reply within a business day. A trial exists on request; its length is not stated.

There is no free key for the REST API. An unauthenticated GET /api/v2/news answers 401 with Access denied for user 0 "anonymous". The one free thing Benzinga publishes is a Basic News API listed on AWS Data Exchange at no charge, delivered as S3 objects rather than as an API key. The suite page still links a "Free Stock News RSS Feed" product, and that link 404s.

Data & coverage

The newswire product page states history from 2010, coverage of US equities and macroeconomics, JSON and XML output, and intraday delivery on Eastern time. The API home page claims an 84-terabyte news archive and datasets since 2009.

Latency is claimed two ways and they do not agree: the marketing page says under 0.1 seconds, while the docs FAQ says the newsfeed "is updated every few minutes".

GET /api/v2/news pages at up to 100 items, filters on tickers, ISIN, CUSIP, channels, topics, authors, content type, importance rank 1–5 and region, and takes updatedSince for deltas, which the docs recommend for live ingestion. Two published limits contradict each other — the news spec allows page offsets from 0 to 100000, the quickstart says no result set may exceed 10,000 items — so slice history by date rather than by deep paging.

Press releases, Why Is It Moving, the Canadian wire, translated news, crypto, video, squawk audio and the NewsQuantified sentiment feed are each their own product and their own line item.

Integrations

Pull over REST, push over a persistent TCP connection (username plus key, JSON messages, with Go and Python clients), a WebSocket news stream, and a webhook engine that posts filtered data to your endpoint. Official clients exist for Python, Java and Node — the Python package benzinga is published by Benzinga Developers, but its newest release on PyPI is 1.21 from February 2021, while the repository's commits run into March 2026 and it cuts no GitHub releases — the docs work around the gap by telling you to install from the git repository rather than from PyPI. The SDK index page is still unedited template text about fetching secrets, though the Java, Node and Python pages behind it are real.

Limitations

• The licensed feed's redistribution terms are not published. What is public is the website's terms of service, from Accretive Capital LLC doing business as Benzinga — personal, non-commercial use of the site, no republishing or framing without permission — reposted unchanged on the API licensing portal, and the standard AWS Data Subscription Agreement attached to the free AWS listing, which bars passing the data on to third parties. Neither is the contract for a licensed feed, so what you may do with that is whatever your order form says, and you will not see one before you talk to sales.
• Display rights are the whole negotiation. The API can hand you the article body, HTML and all. Whether your product may show it is the thing you are buying — the AWS listing sells the free tier as headline, teaser and a link back, and names fully embeddable body content as a paid upgrade. What the contracted feed grants is unpublished.
• Training is a separate purchase. No public page states whether the news licence permits model training. The one thing Benzinga does publish is a product page selling licensed corpora for training LLMs — which tells you training rights are sold, not bundled.
• The CUSIP filter is marked in the spec as requiring its own licence agreement, because CUSIPs are somebody else's property.
• Rate limits are per plan and nowhere public; the only documented behaviour is a 429.
• US equities. Canadian breaking news, translations and crypto are other products.
• XML output exists and new integrations are told not to use it.

Alternatives

Marketaux and Finnhub sell news APIs you can sign up for with a card and read the terms of first, which is the opposite trade to this one. TickerTick is free and needs no key at all, aggregating rather than originating. If it is specifically Benzinga copy you want and a licence negotiation you do not, Alpaca carries the feed back to 2015 on its free data plan, with the $99-a-month tier buying a higher rate limit rather than the news itself.

Compare it against the rest of the market data APIs.