Unusual Whales

What it is

Unusual Whales is an options-tape vendor with a retail front end on top. The data is the product: every option print carrying sweep, block and multi-leg markers, dark pool prints, per-strike gamma and Greek exposure, and the disclosure feeds — congressional trades, Form 4 insider transactions, 13F institutional holdings — all from one REST API with WebSocket channels alongside.

The published docs list 231 operations across 36 groups. US equities and options are the core; futures, FX, crypto and commodity series are gated to the Advanced tier and above.

Pricing

Two products, billed separately, and the ladders do not overlap. The web dashboard is $50 (Retail Basic), $75 (Retail Pro) and $120 (Retail Max) a month; a free account sees the same screens on 15-minute delayed data and gets no key. A dashboard plan does not include an API key, and an API plan does not include the dashboard.

API keys start at $150/month (Basic: two-year lookback, REST only) and $375/month (Advanced: uncapped REST requests, WebSocket streaming, CME futures, and the forex, commodities, economic and digital-currency endpoints). Annual billing takes roughly a sixth off both. Business plans — Startup, Kafka and Enterprise, the ones that carry commercial licensing — start at $625/month billed annually.

Data & coverage

US only for anything you would buy this for. The options tape starts 1 January 2022 and how much of it you can reach is set by your plan's lookback window, not by the archive: a date outside the window returns 403 and names your earliest available date. Bulk downloads of a day's full tape — a zip of one CSV — come through the API itself inside that window; history older than it is arranged separately.

Congress covers recent trades, late reports, per-politician histories and trades flagged unusual by committee conflict or size. Insiders covers Form 4 transactions with sector and ticker aggregates. Both inherit the statutory reporting lag — the data is the filing, not the trade.

Integrations

REST on every paid key, WebSocket from the Advanced tier up, Kafka on the business plans, and a first-party MCP server plus published agent skill files. There is an OpenAPI spec but no official client library.

Limitations

• No permanent free tier on the API. Seven days, then $150 a month.
• A 90-day trial window is too short to evaluate anything historical, which is most of what you would test before paying.
• No options tape before 2022 at any price.
• Redistribution needs a business plan; the retail and standard API terms do not carry it.
• The consumer-facing pitch is alerts and unusual-activity flags, and flow alone throws thousands of signals a day, most of them hedges rather than directional bets. The API gives you the same prints without the framing, which is the honest way to use it.
• The AI layer does not stop at analysis. The dashboard tiers sell "Mr. Whale, your AI Analyst and Trade Finder", and the vendor's own published agent skill for earnings volatility emits Recommended / Consider / Avoid verdicts per ticker and then sizes a call calendar spread. That is a call, not a dataset, and it carries the vendor's own not-investment-advice disclaimer.

Alternatives

Massive (formerly Polygon.io) sells the US options tape as raw data with no flow layer and no disclosure feeds. For congressional and insider filings alone there are cheaper single-purpose feeds. Compare against the rest of the market data APIs.