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Leading options · 8 ranked from 14 screened

Market-data APIs

Market-data APIs evaluated across query cost at real volume, self-host escape hatch, vendor continuity, and indexing speed and coverage.

CoinMarketCap API
#1 of 8 · published ranking
CoinMarketCap API
79ChainChoice Score
Why it leads
Best in the pool on entry tier durability (7/10; next 6/10)
Cost
Not priced · No comparable price is published
No provider can pay for a position in this table. The code that computes this order cannot read which links earn us a commission, and every build proves it. Every score below rebuilds from the published criteria.Ranking 2026.08 · 4 criteria · 8 products · same inputs, same order
Personal comparison

Market-data APIs ranked comparison

No comparable price is published; ranking still uses verified product evidence.

RankProviderBest fitScore
1
CoinMarketCap APICoinMarketCap APICredit-metered REST API for price, volu...Top ranked
Published cost at production call volume — 8/10Trade-off: Two things the page will not tell you plainly. The annual plans are not discounts — e...
79score
Check availability for your countryVisit CoinMarketCap API · coinmarketcap.com

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

2
CoinGecko APICoinGecko APICredit-metered REST and WebSocket API c...
Coverage and documented granularity — 8/10Trade-off: The licence is complete, readable and heavy — read it before the pricing page. Correc...
77score
Check availability for your countryVisit CoinGecko API · coingecko.com

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

3
Coinpaprika APIPer-call REST market data API with publ...
Published cost at production call volume — 9/10Trade-off: The redistribution right you would be buying this API for is on the one tier with no...
76score
Check availability for your countryVisit Coinpaprika API · coinpaprika.com

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

4
KaikoKaikoInstitutional tick-level trade and orde...
Coverage and documented granularity — 9/10Trade-off: Two gaps sit behind the four published numbers. The figures are floors with an open c...
70score
Check availability for your countryVisit Kaiko · kaiko.com

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

5
Messari APIMulti-service crypto data API offering...
Coverage and documented granularity — 6/10Trade-off: The transparent price is a trap at scale and the scalable price is unreadable. x402 l...
64score
Check availability for your countryVisit Messari API · api.messari.io

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

6
Dune APIDune APISQL query engine over indexed blockchai...
Published cost at production call volume — 4/10Trade-off: Dune is not priced per API call and is not a cross-venue market-data feed, so both it...
61score
Check availability for your countryVisit Dune API · dune.com

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

2 more assessed and ranked below — none of them hidden for commercial reasons.
Ranking blindCommercial terms excludedDated primary sources

Ranked on 4 published criteria weighted 30/28/20/22, which set goal alignment — 30 of the 86 points. The rest: regional access 20, evidence depth 18, ease of use 10, institutional trust 8. Profile match is shown in breakdowns but carries no weight.

Audit
Infrastructure
Methodology
2026.09.15
published 2026-09-16
Providers tracked
980+
across 119 categories
Last verified
2026-09-27
newest dated pricing or sentiment read
Named on the roster
2 people
managing directors · 6 automated processes
Decision guide

What matters most before choosing in this category

If the data will be visible to your own users, read the licence before the price list, because that is where this category actually binds. Redistribution is the right most products need and the one least often included: at Coinpaprika the comparison table marks it unavailable on every published tier including the $799 plan, and available only on a custom enterprise agreement. CoinMarketCap points API buyers at its commercial terms with a link that serves a marketing page instead. If your use is internal, the decision flips to cost at your real call volume — and the expectation about who hides pricing is inverted here, with the institutional vendor publishing numbered floors while a mass-market one does not.

What matters most before choosing in this category

If the data will be visible to your own users, read the licence before the price list, because that is where this category actually binds. Redistribution is the right most products need and the one least often included: at Coinpaprika the comparison table marks it unavailable on every published tier including the $799 plan, and available only on a custom enterprise agreement. CoinMarketCap points API buyers at its commercial terms with a link that serves a marketing page instead. If your use is internal, the decision flips to cost at your real call volume — and the expectation about who hides pricing is inverted here, with the institutional vendor publishing numbered floors while a mass-market one does not.

Will the data be visible to your own users, and does the tier you are pricing actually permit that?
What does the bill look like at your real monthly call volume, not on the free tier?
How far back does intraday history go on the plan you are buying, as opposed to on the marketing card?
Current editor lead

Expert review and scoring weights

CoinMarketCap API
CoinMarketCap APIData checked Sep 2026
Credit-metered REST API for price, volume and exchange data with published per-tier credit quotas.

Credit-metered REST API for price, volume and exchange data with published per-tier credit quotas. Strongest on published cost at production call volume (8/10): CoinMarketCap prints Growth at "$ 299 /mo" for "2M call credits/mo", so a million credits costs $299 from the page alone; the step from Startup's 450K credits straight to 2M is steep and the unit is credits rather than calls. Weakest on redistribution and licensing rights (4/10): CoinMarketCap's pricing FAQ grants commercial use from Basic up but caps it at "one product with up to 100k users" for end users' "personal, non-commercial purposes", with wider scope only under an unpriced Enterprise licence; the linked Commercial Terms of Use lead to a marketing page, not a licence. Published price: Fetched 2026-09-27 from the CoinMarketCap API pricing page (HTTP 200, verified against the raw served HTML); every subscription price is unchanged from 2026-08-06.

Best forPublished cost at production call volume — 8/10
Main tradeoffTwo things the page will not tell you plainly. The annual plans are not discounts — every yearly figure is exactly twelve times the monthly one ($3,588 = 12 x $299), and the "Save up to 20%" banner is measured against struck-through prices nothing is sold at; only the "10_perc_off_yearly_cmc" checkout code produces a real reduction. And if you need intraday history, the plan cards' "All time historical data" does not mean what it says: at Growth ($299/mo) the 5m-12h history window is three months, and reaching 2010 at intraday resolution requires Enterprise.
Verify before signupFetched 2026-09-27 from the CoinMarketCap API pricing page (HTTP 200, verified against the raw served HTML); every subscription price is unchanged from 2026-08-06. Six tiers: Basic free, "15,000" credits/mo, "50 requests per minute"; Builder "$ 29 /mo" or "$ 420 $ 348/year", "150K call credits/mo", "300 requests per minute"; Startup "$ 79 /mo" or "$ 1140 $ 948/year", "450K call credits/mo", "600 requests per minute"; Growth "$ 299 /mo" or "$ 4500 $ 3588/year", "2M call credits/mo", "750 requests per minute"; Professional "$ 699 /mo" or "$ 10500 $ 8388/year", "5M call credits/mo", "1200 requests per minute"; Enterprise "Inquire for pricing", "30,000,000" credits, "1600+ requests per minute". New since August: an "x402-Enabled Endpoints" table prices five endpoints at "0.01 USDC" per call with a "30/min per wallet" rate limit and the footnote "Pricing is subject to change. Please check the 402 Payment Required response for the latest pricing." NORMALISATION (2026-09-27, unit = USD/month for the cheapest published plan supplying >=1,000,000 credits/month, worked example): Startup's 450,000 credits fall short, so the cheapest qualifying plan is Growth at $299.00/mo; $299 / 2,000,000 credits = $0.0001495 per credit = $0.1495 per 1,000 credits — still the lowest per-call subscription rate in the pool. The x402 path at 1,000,000 calls would be 1,000,000 x $0.01 = $10,000.00/month, 33x Growth, so it prices sporadic agent traffic, not production volume. ANNUAL ARITHMETIC (worked example), checked on every priced tier: $348/12 = $29.00; $948/12 = $79.00; $3,588/12 = $299.00; $8,388/12 = $699.00 — every annual figure is exactly twelve times the monthly figure, so the yearly commitment carries no discount at any tier; the struck-through numbers ($420, $1,140, $4,500, $10,500) are reference prices nothing is sold at, and the page's "Save up to 20%" banner measures against them. The page still shows "Limited-time offer 🎉 10% off all yearly plans with code at checkout 10_perc_off_yearly_cmc", which would be a real reduction.
Methodology

How this category is reviewed

Reviewed on published cost at production call volume, redistribution and licensing rights, what the free tier actually survives, and coverage and documented granularity.

The order on this page is the published ranking for this category. Every criterion, weight and source behind it is on the methodology page.
Frequently asked

Questions people ask before choosing data apis

Can I show this data to my own users?
Only if your plan grants redistribution, and that is rarer than the pricing pages suggest. Coinpaprika's own comparison table, read from its raw served HTML, marks redistribution unavailable on Free, Starter, Pro, Business and Ultimate — every published tier, including the $799 one — and available only under a custom enterprise agreement. One of the mass-market vendors here does grant it, and its terms expressly permit charging for products that integrate the API, subject to an attribution requirement with a specified minimum font size. The general rule for this category is that the pricing page tells you the cost and the terms page tells you whether you may do the thing you are buying it for.
Which vendor is cheapest?
It depends entirely on your call volume, and the extremes are further apart than the marketing implies. The only vendor publishing an exact per-call price settles it on-chain in USDC with no account required — and normalised to a per-call basis it is the most expensive here by two to three orders of magnitude, which is a reasonable trade for zero onboarding on low volume and a poor one at scale. At the other end, the institutional vendor a buyer would assume routes everything through sales publishes numbered monthly floors on its product page. Price the plan at the volume you will actually run, not the tier you will start on.
How much history does the free or entry tier really give me?
Much less than the plan cards imply, and this is the most common surprise in the category. CoinMarketCap advertises all-time historical data while capping intraday history at one month on its startup tier and three months on the $299 growth tier, with full history only on enterprise. That distinction between daily closes and intraday granularity is what decides whether the plan supports a backtest or only a chart, so check the granularity row rather than the headline before committing to a tier.
REVIEWEDAugust 6, 2026METHOD4 criteriaCATEGORYmarket_data_apis
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
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