IQFeed

What it is

IQFeed is DTN's consolidated market data feed, sold on its own terms rather than as a perk attached to a broker. It is the feed underneath a long list of desktop platforms — Sierra Chart, MultiCharts, AmiBroker, NinjaTrader, MotiveWave and Optuma all connect to it — and it is bought for what those platforms do not supply: unfiltered tick-by-tick data rather than snapshots, and a history archive deep enough to backtest against.

Mechanically it is not a web API. You install IQConnect.exe, a native Windows program, launch it with your login, password, product ID and app version, then open TCP sockets to it on localhost — one for Level 1 streaming, one for history and lookups, one for market depth, one for admin. Commands are comma-delimited text under a versioned protocol, 6.2 current and 4.9 the oldest still served.

Pricing

Published, itemised, and larger than the headline. The core service is $108.15 a month plus a one-time $50 startup fee, which buys the plumbing and delayed data. Every real-time exchange bills its own fee on top, non-refundable once switched on — including during the seven-day trial, for exchanges that grant no trial entitlement.

Worked totals for a non-professional, from the fee schedule dated 1 December 2025:

• US equities — core plus NYSE, Nasdaq and NYSE American at $7.35 each: $130.20/month.
• Equity options — core plus the $60.90 real-time options surcharge plus OPRA at $7.35: $176.40/month.
• CME futures — core plus the $24.87 US futures surcharge plus CME at $139.57: $272.59/month. CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX are $139.57 each as well, and those rates are identical for professionals.

The futures line has an escape hatch. CME's non-professional Globex package cuts the four CME Group exchanges to $2.10 each, or $5.25 for all four at Level 1 — about $138 a month all in — but it needs a fully funded futures account at a broker on DTN's qualified list, software that can route orders to that broker, and a No to all thirteen professional-status questions. Without a broker willing to verify the account, the rate is $139.57.

The professional test is separate and applied at signup: register with a name, address or email tied to a trading company, or appear in FINRA's database or an SEC, CFTC or equivalent registry, and equity exchanges bill professional rates — Nasdaq goes from $7.35 to $31.50, Nasdaq Level II from $63 to $401, OTC Markets Level 1 from $13 to $55. NYSE, NYSE American and OPRA quote professionals at $5.25 "plus fee from exchange", so the professional total for US equities cannot be worked out from the published page at all.

Data & coverage

180 calendar days of tick history with microsecond timestamps where the exchange supplies them; 11+ years of one-minute OHLCV — US stocks, futures and indexes from May 2007, eminis from September 2005, forex from February 2005, London stocks and FTSE indexes from February 2016; and daily, weekly and monthly bars back to 1929 for indexes, 1959 for US futures and 1994 for US stocks. Daily requests are back-adjusted for splits; ticks and interval bars are not.

Equities cover the US, Canada (TSX and TSX Venture) and the UK (LSE); everything else is derivatives — CME Group, ICE, Eurex, Euronext, SGX, ASX24, Bursa Malaysia and BM&F Bovespa, each an entitlement bought separately. Alongside the prices: 700-plus breadth and statistics symbols, most updating every second, US fundamentals, and streaming news from Benzinga Pro, RTTnews, PR Newswire and Business Wire. A basic subscription watches 500 symbols at once, 2,500 for extra.

Integrations

The compatible desktop platforms are the normal way in. Writing your own client is a separate transaction: the API is an annual licence agreement, signed and returned to DTN, priced only on request, and explicitly not included in the data subscription. The protocol is language-agnostic, but there is no first-party Python package — pyiqfeed and the other wrappers are third-party. Excel and OpenOffice Calc link through built-in DDE, Windows-only. A ProphetX mobile add-on covers iOS and Android, with different futures symbology and no market depth.

Limitations

• The base price is not the price. Exchange fees are per exchange, per month, non-refundable once entitled, and can exceed the subscription itself — CME alone is more than the core service.
• Windows only. No native macOS or Linux build and no plans for one; DTN's answer is CrossOver, Wine or a VM, and it will not troubleshoot inside them.
• One machine at a time. A second computer, or the mobile app, disconnects the first; a separate test environment means a second login ID at full price.
• Tick history is capped at 8 days during regular trading hours. The full 180 days is only retrievable outside 9:30–16:00, which shapes when a backfill job can run.
• No REST, no JSON, no hosted endpoint. A local Windows process is a hard dependency for every deployment, including servers, and historical requests are capped at 50 per second.
• The seven-day trial is throttled to 4 days of intraday history and 365 days of daily bars, so it does not test the thing most buyers are paying for.

Alternatives

Databento for the same tick-level ambition over HTTP and raw TCP with no Windows dependency, billed per gigabyte. Massive if a hosted REST API on a flat subscription matters more than sub-second latency. For history alone, Kibot, FirstRate Data, AlgoSeek and Norgate Data sell files and skip the exchange-fee stack entirely.

Compare it against the rest of the market data APIs.