Marketstack

Cheap worldwide end-of-day bars over JSON, with US intraday bolted on from IEX.

by APILayer

Last updated

Visit Marketstack
From
$9.99/mo
Free tier
Yes
Latency
Delayed
Non-US markets
Yes

What it is

Marketstack is the stock-data entry in APILayer's catalogue of interchangeable REST APIs. One access_key query parameter, HTTP GET, JSON back. The v2 API covers end-of-day bars, splits, dividends, ticker and exchange metadata, market indices, bonds, ETF holdings, commodity prices and — added recently — six SEC EDGAR endpoints for 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K filings.

The pitch is breadth at a low price rather than depth. How much breadth depends on which of the vendor's pages you read: the documentation, revised in September 2026, says 125,000+ tickers with end-of-day and adjusted prices across 72+ exchanges, 30,000+ tickers in the search and company endpoints, 2,700+ exchanges in the metadata lookup and 750+ indices, while the homepage still advertises 500,000+ tickers in EOD. US data is licensed from Tiingo; the rest comes from unnamed "high-authority" providers, which is as specific as the site gets about provenance.

Pricing

Free is 100 requests a month — the pricing table, the homepage and the v2 docs all say 100, and the stray 1,000 in one of the vendor's FAQ answers is contradicted by the answer directly below it. Basic is $9.99, Professional $49.99, Business $149.99, and yearly billing shaves up to 15%. Quota is the axis everything moves along — 10,000, 100,000, 500,000 requests — with features stacked on top: intraday on Basic, real-time updates and commodities on Professional, company financials on Business.

Count requests carefully: one request equals one ticker, so a five-symbol call spends five. Overages are billed rather than blocked, at $0.003996 per call on Basic falling to $0.0012 on Business.

Data & coverage

End-of-day is the product. Intraday exists for US tickers via IEX, which is a single venue with a low share of consolidated volume, not a full national feed. The documented "real-time" update frequency is every minute, every five minutes or every ten minutes, so one minute is the floor. History runs one year on Free, ten on Basic, 15+ above that.

Integrations

There is nothing to set up. Requests are plain HTTPS GETs against api.marketstack.com/v2/ with the key passed as an access_key query parameter, which is convenient and also puts the key in every log line, proxy and browser history it travels through. Paging is limit and offset; responses are JSON.

The first-party tooling amounts to a Postman collection you fork from the quickstart, plus the v2 endpoint reference, which now lives on APILayer's documentation host rather than on marketstack's own site. The account is the other integration point worth knowing about — one APILayer key, one dashboard and one bill across their whole API family, which is a real reason to pick this over a dedicated market-data vendor and no reason at all otherwise.

Limitations

  • No options, futures, forex or crypto — other APILayer products cover currencies.
  • No WebSocket at any tier; "real-time" means polling an endpoint that updates about once a minute.
  • Free tier is non-commercial and 100 requests, which is a demo, not a prototype.
  • JSON only. No CSV, no flat files, no bulk download.
  • No official client library. The vendor's own apilayer/marketstack repository is archived and was last pushed to in 2020; the packages on PyPI and npm are third-party, and the PyPI one labels itself "inofficial". What the vendor does ship is a Postman collection.
  • API v1 was marked deprecated for use after 30 June 2025. The v2 docs say it remains available but will not receive new features; among the differences they list is that v2 is HTTPS on every plan, which v1 was not.
  • The vendor's own pages disagree about coverage — 125,000+ tickers in the September 2026 documentation against 500,000+ on the homepage. Check the tickers you need before you subscribe.

Alternatives

Alpha Vantage sits in the same price bracket with a free tier that is actually usable and adds technical indicators. EODHD is the closest competitor on the same pitch — global end-of-day for a low monthly fee. Anyone who needs tick data, options or a streaming socket should not start here.

Compare it against the rest of the market data APIs.

Specs

Interfaces
API
Export
JSON
Asset classes
Stocks, ETF, Indices, Bonds, Commodities
Markets
Global
Platforms
Web
AI features
None
Pricing verified
Capabilities verified
Coverage verified

Also worth comparing

  • AlgoSeek — Lossless SIP, OPRA and CME tick history with published per-asset-class lease pricing.
  • Alpha Vantage — The API most people's first script talks to — free key, wide coverage, hard rate limits.
  • CSI Data — End-of-day futures history back to 1922 and eight ways to build a continuous contract.
  • EODHD — End-of-day and fundamentals for 60+ exchanges worldwide, at a hobbyist price.
  • Nasdaq Data Link — What Quandl became — Nasdaq's own exchange feeds plus a curated data catalogue.
  • Norgate Data — Survivorship-bias-free end-of-day history with delisted stocks and index constituents.

Named as a replacement for

FAQ

Is the Marketstack free plan usable for anything real?

Barely. It allows 100 requests per month, end-of-day data only, one year of history, and its licence is non-commercial. One request covers one ticker, so a single 100-symbol backfill exhausts the month. If you have seen 1,000 quoted, that is one stale answer on the vendor's own FAQ page; the pricing table, the homepage, the v2 documentation and the very next answer on that same FAQ page all say 100.

Is Marketstack real-time?

For US tickers only, and only from IEX. Professional and above unlock intraday intervals below 15 minutes, down to one minute, which is as fresh as it gets — the documentation describes real-time updates as data "updated every minute, every 5 minutes or every 10 minutes". Everything outside the US is end-of-day, and there is no WebSocket — you poll.

Who owns Marketstack?

APILayer, which sells it alongside currencylayer, ipstack and the rest of the "stack/layer" API family. APILayer has been part of Idera, Inc. since 2021, and the legal terms sit on Idera's site.

Can I use Marketstack data commercially?

Not on the free plan, which is explicitly non-commercial. Commercial use starts on Basic at $9.99 a month. Redistribution to your own users is not addressed on the public pages — ask before you design around it.