ORATS

What it is

ORATS sells one thing: cleaned US options data with the volatility work already done. Every strike returns NBBO bid and ask, a theoretical value, the full greeks, and smvVol — a smoothed fit of the implied volatility surface, reconciled with put-call parity, dividends and a residual rate rather than left as a noisy mid between wide markets. The saving is not having to fit that surface across thousands of tickers yourself.

This card covers the data — the REST API and the flat-file archives. The ORATS dashboard is a separate $99/month subscription that shares only the login.

Pricing

Four API plans, each including the one below it: Delayed at $199/month for 20,000 requests, Live at $299 for 100,000, Live Intraday at $599 for 1,000,000, All-In at $899. Four Tools APIs — option scanner, backtest finder, intraday backtester, time and sales — bolt onto any plan at $99 or $299 each, or come bundled in All-In.

Flat files are priced apart from the API: near-end-of-day is $99/month plus $599 once for the 2007 archive; the one-minute set is $199/month plus $1,500 for the backfill, and the vendor warns of $1,000–$2,000 in AWS charges on top.

Data & coverage

End-of-day to 2007, one-minute bars to August 2020, tick prints with greeks attached to September 2022, over 5,000 symbols. The October 2020 date the vendor prints elsewhere is a different set: the Intraday Backtester engine runs on a ~140-symbol snapshot taken every minute from 9:34 ET, not on the full one-minute archive. Delisted tickers are retained, which is what keeps a backtest clear of survivorship bias. Live endpoints need signed exchange agreements.

Integrations

REST and JSON, an OpenAPI 3.1 document, docs served as Markdown, and an official npm CLI that wires an MCP server. No Python client, no spreadsheet add-in.

Limitations

• No free tier and no trial. $199/month is the floor.
• US equity, ETF and index options only. No futures options, no non-US listings.
• The daily snapshot is taken 14 minutes before the close, so it will not reconcile with a 16:00 mark.
• One implied volatility and one delta per strike: SMV reconciles calls and puts, so the file cannot show where the two disagreed.
• Index underlyings carry a solved implied futures price per expiration, not the cash index.
• The end-of-day S3 archive is a 14-day download window, once.

Alternatives

Massive (formerly Polygon.io) and Databento sell raw options ticks cheaper if you intend to fit your own surfaces; OptionMetrics IvyDB is the institutional end-of-day set, back to 1996, and publishes no price. The rest of the field is in market data APIs.