IVolatility API

What it is

IVolatility is a US options analytics vendor, and this card covers its REST API: the retail Builder, Quant and Lab plans and the professional APIs sold by quote. The data is the vendor's own processed set — NBBO option prices, volume and open interest, raw implied volatility and greeks per contract — plus two derived series. IVX is a constant-maturity IV index built from the four strikes nearest the money and normalised to tenors from 7 to 1,080 days; the IV surface puts out-of-the-money IV on the same tenors across 50% to 150% of spot.

Every retail plan includes IVolAI, an AI layer that writes and runs Python backtests against the API in a cloud VS Code workspace. The API works without it. IVolLive, the vendor's browser platform, is a separate subscription and not this card.

Pricing

Three retail plans with identical endpoints and different monthly quotas: Builder at $79 for 20,000 requests, Quant at $199 for 100,000, Lab at $299 sold as unlimited. The pricing page opens on annual billing, where they read $63, $159 and $239. Every plan is capped at one request per second, burst five, and EOD, intraday and real-time requests draw on separate pools.

The trial is 7 days. Cancelling ends access at once, paid time included, and a month is refunded only if it saw no API calls and no AI use. $50 of AI credit is included; the API does not need it.

Professional use goes through four quote-only PRO APIs — real-time, historical, backtesting and fixed income. End-of-day files are also sold without a subscription through Data Download, at $0.20 to $0.60 per ticker per day.

Data & coverage

US options come from OPRA: over 5,500 equity and ETF underlyings plus indices, back to January 2005, delisted names included, with 30-day IVX to May 1999. The EOD price is the mid of the closing best bid and ask, published after 17:00 ET; a 15:45 ET snapshot is kept too, and the vendor points same-day expiries at the one-minute data instead.

That one-minute data — NBBO with IV and greeks — covers US equity options only, lands after the close, and leaves out the non-standard series corporate actions create. Everything outside the US is end-of-day: stocks, futures and options for Canada, Europe, Asia and Latin America, with US futures from 2006. IV comes from Black-Scholes for European-style options and American-style ones on non-dividend underlyings, and a 100-step binomial tree otherwise, on SOFR-OIS rates.

Integrations

REST returning JSON, keyed by API key, password or a 30-minute token. Above 500 rows a query returns an empty data array and a link to a gzipped CSV, so check recordsFound before concluding nothing matched. The Python library is ivolatility on PyPI, the vendor's own (1.9.5, 23 July 2026, BSD-2-Clause), returning pandas frames. Excel support is a sample Power Query workbook last changed in 2023, not an add-in. Bulk history ships separately over FTP, Snowflake, AWS and Azure. An AI-tool connector is advertised, but its setup sits behind a login and no public page names the protocol, so no MCP server is marked here.

Limitations

• Retail plans are personal use by one person. Any business use, including an app that shows the data to others, needs a quoted professional licence — see redistribution.
• The retail pages name no OPRA fee or exchange subscriber agreement. The professional page offers a "fair value" real-time price it says needs no exchange approvals, distinct from market prices. Ask which one a quote covers.
• No streaming on retail plans: real-time is a snapshot refreshed every 40 to 60 seconds.
• Retail plans are "not designed for downloading all market data", and trying may suspend the account.
• Lab is "unlimited" on the pricing page and in the FAQ, and 4,000,000 requests a month in the API docs.
• The earnings endpoint returns vendor-scored straddle and strangle setups with win probabilities beside the dates. That is editorial output, not market data.

Alternatives

ORATS sells a smoothed US surface with end-of-day history to 2007, from $199. ThetaData is cheaper for raw OPRA ticks and streaming, US only. Cboe DataShop sells OPRA history by the file; Databento and Massive sell raw options ticks beside equities. The rest are in market data APIs.