Marketstack REVIEW – Stock Data Real-Time, Intraday & Historical Market Data API
Anyone searching for a scalable, cost-effective alternative to Yahoo Finance will find a lot to love in Marketstack’s REST API. Compiling its dataset from high-authority data providers worldwide, Marketstack empowers you to parse 125,000+ stock tickers across 72 exchanges worldwide, for truly global market insights.
If we’ve caught your attention, read on. Below, we review Marketstack’s feature set, web interface, documentation, performance, and pricing in depth.
The Marketstack elevator pitch
Marketstack delivers real-time and historical data, dating back some 30 years, at lightning speed. Narrow your search to individual tickers, or monitor entire exchanges with equal ease. Whether you’re trading at the start or end of the day, or throughout the day, you can tailor your requests for end-of-day and intraday results.
Whatever your needs, Marketstack’s cloud-based infrastructure is robust enough to handle millions of requests per day, and boasts near-perfect uptime. Of course, there’s no obligation to pay for more service than you need; sign up for a free subscription for up to 1,000 API requests per month. Integrating Marketstack can be done within 5 minutes, with exceptional documentation to aid developers in most major programming languages.
Getting started with Marketstack
Apilayer has an outstanding track record of making their products highly accessible, and Marketstack is no exception. To sign up, simply click SIGN UP FREE in the top-right of the home page, select the Free plan, enter your credentials, and you’re in.
They don’t badger you to put a credit card on file “just in case” you decide to upgrade later (or forget to cancel a trial subscription). Instead, they provide plenty of value up front to allow you to explore their offering with no cost or obligation to you. In our opinion, this shows Apilayer has confidence in their product, and moreover respects their customers.
Dashboard
Once you’ve created your account, you’ll arrive at the Marketstack dashboard. All the menu options are pretty much self-explanatory, but we’ll give you a quick orientation tour.
The main dashboard page makes it easy to see all of your account and subscription metadata at a glance. There are two helpful buttons at the top of the page that take you to their 3-Step Quickstart Guide (essentially a cheat sheet to using Marketstack), as well as the API Documentation. We’ll cover the latter in greater depth in its own section.
Next, you’ll see your API key, along with the option to reset it. If you ever suspect your key is insecure, rotate it out and rest easier.
Finally, there are fields displaying your Subscription, API Usage, Account credentials, and Payment information. Each displays a summary of the information contained in the corresponding sidebar options.
Menu options
- Upgrade/Subscription Plan – If you’re signed up to the Free plan, these links will be redundant, as they both take you to the subscription tier page to view your upgrade options. Otherwise, you can always click the latter to view your plan, billing period, and how much of your monthly request limit you’ve used thus far.
- Account – This is where you can manage your account credentials, as well as your notifications. We appreciate how simple it is to disable all communications from Marketstack to prevent inbox clutter. It’s similarly easy to change your password on this page; and if you decide Marketstack isn’t for you, the option to delete your account is right there at the bottom of the page and doesn’t make you jump through any hoops.
- Payment – Make accounting a little easier with the Payment menu option. You can manage your billing methods, and view all your invoices here.
- API Usage – The number of requests you can make per month is tied to your subscription plan, and you can view how close you are to hitting your limit here. What’s more, you’ll find usage statistics below to help you manage your account in a more informed way.
Marketstack documentation
Any API worth its salt will have clear, concise documentation to help developers with implementation and usage. We appreciate Marketstack’s Plain-English approach to describing its methods, though there are plenty of code examples to help the rubber meet the road.
Below, we briefly cover each of Marketstack’s API endpoints and parameters.
Note: To save on some verbiage, know that it is always possible to limit how many results are returned, plus set a pagination offset for readability’s sake.
Authentication
As with any API, you’ll need to specify your access key with the access_key parameter. Nothing fancy here.
Encryption
Only available to paying customers, Marketstack offers 256-bit HTTPS encryption to secure your connection to their cloud-based servers. Simply append that magical little ‘s’ to the http protocol in the API base URL to make it happen.
Errors
Nobody likes debugging in the dark, so Marketstack provides a litany of error codes to spell out just what went wrong with your request. It’s easy to take for granted until you use an API that doesn’t do error reporting the right way.
End-of-day Data
To check closing stock prices, append the /eod endpoint to your request. You can fetch end-of-day data from specific exchanges or stocks with the exchange and symbols parameters, respectively, then sort them by ascending or descending value. It’s also possible to view data on a specific date, or simply request the latest information.
Intraday Data
Day traders will appreciate the /intraday endpoint which allows you to set data retrieval intervals. Once again, you can request intraday data on individual stocks or from specific exchanges with the corresponding parameters, and sort them the same way as with the /eod endpoint. Appending /[date] or /latest objects to your request also works to narrow your results in on a specific point in time. Here’s an example from Marketstack’s documentation:
{
"pagination": {
"limit": 100,
"offset": 0,
"count": 100,
"total": 5000
},
"data": [
{
"date": "2020-06-02T00:00:00+0000"
"symbol": "AAPL",
"exchange": "IEXG",
"open": 317.75,
"high": 322.35,
"low": 317.21,
"close": 317.94,
"last": 318.91,
"volume": 41551000
},
[...]
]
}
Historical Data
It is quite easy to retrieve historical data for any stock or exchange using the date_from and date_to parameters. These methods are compatible with both intraday and end-of-day requests.
Real-Time Updates
Marketstack is capable of making intervalic intraday requests to return real-time data. While all users can set the interval parameter to 30min, 1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, or 24h, Professional tier users unlock 15min, 10min, 5min, and even 1min intervals for truly cutting-edge market updates.
Tickers
An alternative way to retrieve data on specific stock tickers is to use the /tickers endpoint. There are various ways to construct requests using a multitude of objects including ticker symbols and dates. Both end-of-day and intraday requests are available in most of their permutations.
Exchanges
This endpoint allows you to view data on any or all of Marketstack’s 72 stock exchanges. Here’s an example of what such a request can return:
{
"pagination": {
"limit": 100,
"offset": 0,
"count": 71,
"total": 71
},
"data": [
{
"name": "NASDAQ Stock Exchange",
"acronym": "NASDAQ",
"mic": "XNAS",
"country": "USA",
"country_code": "US",
"city": "New York",
"website": "www.nasdaq.com",
"timezone": {
"timezone": "America/New_York",
"abbr": "EST",
"abbr_dst": "EDT"
}
},
[...]
]
}
Currencies
Need metadata on a specific currency? Append the /currencies endpoint to your request to return results on all the currencies Marketstack supports.
Timezones
As Marketstack deals with global stock data, it makes sense that there would be useful information on each time zone. The /timezones endpoint allows you to view it.
Performance and proof
With such a wide degree of utility, you may wonder just how well Marketstack is able to perform. Apilayer is a major player in the industry, and produces finely tuned, neatly coded RESTful API products as a rule.
Marketstack is built on Apilayer’s vast, powerful cloud-based infrastructure, fast-tracking response data coded in the lightweight JSON format. Their servers routinely process tens of millions of requests per day, and boast nearly 100% uptime since its June 2020 launch.
With such scalable performance and feature sets, companies just starting up all the way to multinational enterprises use Marketstack. In fact, over 30,000+ companies are counted among Marketstack’s clientele, including Microsoft, Accenture, Amazon, Credit Suisse, Uber, Accenture, Revolut, and more. It’s also widely used in academic circles, with over 75 universities including MIT and NYU served.
Pricing
Marketstack has a solution for everyone, and this is apparent in their generously provisioned subscription tiers. All plans are available on a month-by-month basis, or at a 20% discount when you pay a year at a time. Payment methods include Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, Diner’s Club, and PayPal, though Enterprise and high-volume customers can request to set up a bank transfer.
Let’s take a look at Marketstack’s monthly subscription tiers:
- Free – $0/month – This is the most stripped-down version of Marketstack, but if you don’t need high volumes of stock data for commercial purposes, you’ll find the 1,000 requests per month more than adequate. You get access to all 72 worldwide stock exchanges, and can request end-of-day data as often as you have quota remaining.
- Basic – $9.99/month – Paying a nominal monthly fee brings with it a significant step up in Marketstack’s feature set. Your request volume limit balloons ten times to a cap of 10,000/month. You now have the ability to parse intraday in addition to end-of-day data, as well as historical data going back 10 years. As this is the first paid tier, you are entitled to use your results for commercial use, and can access technical support. Marketstack is dedicated to protecting your business’s vital data, and now offers 256-bit HTTPS encryption with the Basic subscription.
- Professional – $49.99/month – This tier is for businesses in need of a true real-time stock monitoring solution–and is thus the most popular choice. Whereas the Basic tier’s intraday function limits the shortest interval to 30-minute updates, the Professional tier allows you to fetch new stock data every 60 seconds. And, with a monthly quota of 100,000 requests, you’ll have plenty of bandwidth to monitor a high volume of tickers and exchanges. Historical data now stretches back over 30 years, available for both end-of-day and intraday prices. As with all paid tiers, you can use your results for commercial use; you’ll enjoy an encrypted connection to Marketstack’s servers; and you can reach out to technical support at any time.
- Business – $149.99 – Marketstack’s true high-volume tier, Business users enjoy all the features of previous tiers, but with a 500,000-request/month limit. What’s more, Business subscribers gain access to priority support, and can tap into the vast expertise of Apilayer’s passionate team.
- Enterprise – Request a quote – If you’re looking for custom solutions, Marketstack’s Enterprise tier removes all barriers and opens the door to innovation. Every resource Apilayer has is at your disposal to identify and meet your needs in the most cost-effect way.
Final verdict
Marketstack’s vast global stock dataset, real-time performance, expert documentation, and world-class customer support make it a highly appealing tool for developers and business owners alike. Another stellar product in Apilayer’s rapidly growing ecosystem, Marketstack is built upon rock-solid cloud-based infrastructure that allows for near-perfect uptime and unlimited scalability. Whether you’re monitoring your personal portfolio or industry movements across multiple exchanges, Marketstack’s flexible subscription model enables you to tailor its services to your needs and budget.
Have you used Marketstack before? Sound off with your thoughts on using its API below.
