Trading Economics

What it is

Trading Economics is a macro database with a web app, spreadsheet add-ins and a REST API over the same series. The job it is bought for is country-level economics — GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, policy rates, government debt, trade balances — across 196 countries, with an economic calendar of scheduled releases beside it and quotes for currencies, indexes, shares, commodities and government bonds bolted on the side.

It also prints its own forecast value beside a series — the vendor's stated scope is hundreds of economic indicators, plus what it calls short-term financial market predictions — and that is not an incidental extra: forecast viewing is a listed feature of the cheapest plan and forecast export of the next one up. What those numbers are is in Limitations.

Pricing

Four plans on one ladder. The web subscription and the API are not separate products: both pricing pages render from the same data file, and API access is a feature the upper tiers carry.

Basic is $29.99 a month and has no API and no data export whatsoever — it buys chart viewing on the website, forecast viewing, alerts, the mobile apps and no ads. Standard is $199 a month and is the cheapest plan with a key: 500 API requests and 500 series exports a month, the Excel add-in and Google Sheets add-on, and forecast export. Professional is $399 a month for 5,000 requests and exports, bulk downloads, news over the API and the MCP server, priced per seat. Enterprise is quoted and is the only plan carrying live streaming, the calendar API, white label and redistribution.

Quarterly billing takes 15% off and yearly 25%, except on Basic, which is $74.99 a quarter or $269.99 a year. There is no free tier: the entry point is a one-week trial costing $4.99, $49 or $99 by plan, capped at 100,000 data points and 100 requests, explicitly non-refundable, and converted to a full subscription automatically if you do not cancel.

Data & coverage

The headline is 20 million indicators, and the vendor's own breakdown is what to read before budgeting around it: 20 thousand come directly from national sources, a million series from the US Federal Reserve, a million from World Bank development indicators, and 20 million from COMTRADE export and import statistics. The bulk of the count is bilateral trade data — useful, but not what most people mean by an economic indicator. The documentation quotes 300,000 series instead, and the terms page a third figure again, 232 countries and 200,000 indicators.

Market quotes are the secondary half and the docs say so plainly: the financial market data is aggregated from a range of third-party providers, supplied as-is, and some of the market-related methods are described as under heavy development. The snapshot endpoint returns a frequency field reading Live, Daily or Delayed by instrument, and the delay is nowhere quantified.

Integrations

REST with the key as a query parameter or an Authorization header, and JSON, CSV or HTML responses. Trading Economics publishes its own Python and Node clients, and here the obvious package name is the vendor's — the PyPI package tradingeconomics is theirs, MIT, at 4.5.11 uploaded 8 July 2026. Beyond that: an Excel desktop add-in that requires Windows, a separate Excel web add-in, a Google Sheets add-on and a Tableau connector. A hosted MCP server answers an unauthenticated call with 401, so it is real; it is gated to Professional and above. Live streaming is a WebSocket and Enterprise-only. There are no webhooks.

Limitations

• The forecasts are the vendor's own model output. Not a consensus of forecasters, not an official projection from a central bank, the IMF or the OECD. Their wording is that forecasts are built using a proprietary global macro model taking into account their analysts' expectations, correlations between countries and a set of logical relationships between indicators. No further methodology is published, and the same sentence covers their projected levels for stock indexes, currencies, commodities and bonds. Their 0–100 sovereign credit score is a separate model, which they describe instead as forward-looking and systematically derived with very limited analyst discretion.
• No free tier and no free key. The guest account that older tutorials still pass returns HTTP 410 pointing at the pricing page.
• 500 API requests a month on the $199 plan is a research allowance, not a production one. The hard limits are 2 requests a second, 10,000 rows per historical call, 1,000 rows per calendar call and a 260-character URL.
• The economic calendar API is not in any self-serve plan. Neither is live streaming. For a product whose calendar is one of its best-known assets, both sit behind a quote.
• Redistribution is Enterprise-only. The published terms grant a limited, personal, nontransferable, revocable licence to analyse the data, and the API page says pricing is adjusted to the distribution you make.

Alternatives

FRED does the same job for nothing — 851,100 series, a free key, 120 requests a minute — and is the honest first stop unless you need the calendar, the non-OECD country breadth or the forecasts. Nasdaq Data Link if the pull is toward a catalogue of purchasable datasets rather than one vendor's own series.

The rest of the field is in market data APIs.