FirstRate Data

What it is

FirstRate Data sells historical US intraday price data as zipped CSV files that you buy once and keep. There is no live feed and nothing to query by symbol: you pay for a bundle, pull zip archives off a customer page or a download API, and the files sit on your own disk. Founded in Chicago in 2017 to fill a gap in intraday futures history, it now covers stocks, ETFs, indices, FX, crypto and end-of-day options.

What separates it from the cheap end of the market is the delisted universe. The stock bundle carries 16,304 tickers, roughly 7,000 of them delisted and suffixed -DELISTED so a reused symbol never collides with its predecessor. Every stock and ETF ships unadjusted, split-adjusted and split-and-dividend adjusted, with volume adjusted alongside price, and the splits and dividends behind those adjustments have been sourced from SEC filings rather than a third-party feed since August 2023.

Pricing

A dataset purchase is a one-off payment with no rebilling, and combining bundles costs less than buying the parts: $839.94 covers stocks, ETFs, indices, futures, FX and crypto against $599.94 for the stock bundle alone. FX majors and crypto are $359.94 each, any single ticker $239.94, and company fundamentals a $239.94 add-on. The vendor says it runs no discounts or promotions.

Every purchase includes one month of free daily updates, except the tick archive, which includes three. Keeping them going afterwards is an optional subscription — $59.95 a month for a single-asset bundle, $79.95 to $99.95 for a combined one, $99.95 a month for the tick archive, $99.95 a year for a single ticker, with annual terms billed at ten months for twelve. Checkout runs through FastSpring in your local currency with local tax already inside the figure, so the dollar prices above are what a US buyer sees rather than a universal list price.

Free means a download page holding one year of 1-minute bars for fifteen named tickers — AAPL, SPY, SPX and twelve others — plus a two-week sample of every dataset. Neither needs an account, and there is no trial of a full bundle.

Data & coverage

Bars come in 1-minute, 5-minute, 30-minute, 1-hour and daily resolutions, one file per ticker and timeframe. History starts January 2000 for stocks and ETFs, 2007 for futures, 2008 for US indices, 2009 for FX, and 2010 for options and for the tick archive. Timestamps mark the start of the bar in US Eastern time, except crypto, which is UTC. Zero-volume bars are omitted, so a gap means no trading rather than missing data, and daily bars are a separate series built from the exchange's official figures that cannot be reproduced by aggregating the minute bars.

Coverage is US-first and narrower than the asset list suggests. Equities are main-exchange listings only, with no OTC securities; the international element is a handful of index tickers such as DAX 40 and the FTSE All Share, some Eurex and ICE Europe futures, 74 FX crosses and 76 crypto pairs. Options are end-of-day Cboe chains with bid, ask, last, open interest, implied volatility and full Greeks, quoted about two minutes before the close. The tick bundle carries trade and NBBO quote ticks across the US venues and runs to 2.4 TB compressed. Updates land late the same evening, though the vendor's own figures disagree: the FAQ and the tick page say 11.30pm Eastern, the home page 11.45pm, the combined-bundle pages 11pm and the options page 10pm.

Integrations

There are none, by design — no plugin, no Python package, no platform-specific export, and the vendor says outright that it supplies no software or conversion scripts. Bundles do get a download API with static links, a last_update endpoint for automated jobs and no rate limits, but it serves zip archives of CSV files rather than rows, and individual-ticker purchases are excluded from it.

Limitations

• The licence forbids redistributing raw data. Derived charts and analysis may be sold; CSV exports, an API returning bars or a table of prices may not, and removing a column does not help. The permitted list is more liberal than that sounds in one respect worth knowing: training AI models on the data and publishing their outputs is explicitly allowed.
• Download links are deactivated the moment a subscription lapses. The licence to use what you already pulled is perpetual, but you must download inside that first free month — three for the tick archive — or keep paying.
• A bundle cannot be sliced — no single ticker, no date range, no custom list. Each archive is a ticker range holding the full history, and the stock bundle alone is 28 GB zipped.
• The delisted universe is incomplete and thins with age — which matters, because avoiding survivorship bias is the main reason to pay for this at all.
• Corporate actions cover splits and dividends only. Mergers and spinoffs are not carried, and the adjusted series do not account for them.
• Options data is end-of-day, unadjusted for splits, and excludes options on futures, FX and commodities. There is no intraday options history at any price.
• No futures metadata at all — no contract specifications, settlement details or trading calendars.

Alternatives

Kibot is the nearest thing in shape — one-time US intraday history as gzipped CSV, reaching back to 1998 rather than 2000. AlgoSeek and Databento sell exchange-sourced tick history to people who need the full book or a redistribution licence, and charge accordingly. For survivorship-bias-free daily bars with index constituent history rather than intraday detail, Norgate Data does that job instead. The rest of the field is in market data APIs.