MoneyFlock may earn a commission if you subscribe to a Lovable Business plan through links in this article, at no extra cost to you. TJ Alam is a certified Lovable Expert.
There is no free stock API for commercial use in the way most listicles imply. Every major free tier is licensed for personal, internal or non-commercial use, and the moment your app shows a price to someone who is not you, you need a paid commercial licence. The cheapest honest route starts at $9.99 a month; the real-time one starts at $2,499.
Every licence quoted below was opened in a browser and re-read on 1 October 2026. Prices and terms change without notice, so treat the dates as part of the fact.
Free Stock API for Commercial Use: The Short Answer
Free tiers are real, generous and genuinely useful. What they are not is licensed for business use. Four of the providers people reach for first say so in plain words on their own pages, and two of them say it on the pricing page rather than buried in a terms document.
- Finnhub: every listed plan is for personal use, and a personal plan cannot be used by a business even internally.
- Alpha Vantage: the free key is personal and non-commercial, and so are the paid premium plans. Commercial use needs a separate conversation.
- Twelve Data: the individual price list is headed personal, internal and non-commercial. Commercial sits on a different page at a different price.
- Massive, formerly Polygon: every individual plan carries an Individual use badge, and the real-time one adds Non-pros only.
- CoinGecko: the free Demo plan requires attribution and is not a commercial licence. The cheapest commercial licence is $35 a month.
- Marketstack: the free plan literally lists Non-Commercial Use as a feature, and the $9.99 plan lists Commercial Use.
That last one matters more than its size suggests. Marketstack is the only provider in this group that prints the licence on the plan card as a feature line, which makes it the clearest and cheapest legitimate step from hobby project to commercial product.
What Each Provider's Own Terms Page Actually Says
This is the table the ranking pages do not have. Each row is quoted or paraphrased from the provider's own terms or pricing page, read on 1 October 2026.
| Provider | Free tier | What the free or individual licence permits | Cheapest commercial licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finnhub | Yes | Personal use only, no business use even internally, no redistribution without written approval | Quoted on request |
| Alpha Vantage | Yes, 25 requests a day | Personal, non-commercial use only, on free and premium alike | Contact sales for onboarding |
| Twelve Data | Yes, 8 credits a minute, 800 a day | Internal non-display usage | Venture, $499 a month |
| Massive | Yes, end of day, 5 calls a minute | Individual use, non-professional subscribers only | Stocks Business, $2,499 a month |
| CoinGecko | Yes, 10k calls a month | Non-commercial, attribution required | Basic, $35 a month |
| Marketstack | Yes, 100 requests a month | Non-Commercial Use, stated on the plan card | Basic, $9.99 a month |
| EODHD | Yes, sandbox | Personal plans, personal use | Commercial internal use, $399 a month |
| Yahoo Finance | No official public API | Nothing is licensed to you | Not offered |
Finnhub
Finnhub's terms of service contain the bluntest sentence in the category: all plans listed on the website are strictly for personal use unless explicitly stated otherwise, and a personal plan cannot be used by any business even internally without written approval. The same section disqualifies you from personal plans if you are using the data for your business, registering under a business name regardless of industry, or deducting the subscription as a business expense.
Two further clauses are easy to miss and expensive to breach. You agree not to redistribute or share access to the data or derived results with any third party without written approval, and all data must be deleted when your subscription to that data ends. A cached price history in your own database is covered by that second clause.
Alpha Vantage
Alpha Vantage's terms of service are not an HTML page at all. The link serves a four page PDF, which is probably why almost nobody quotes it. Section 2 grants a licence for personal, non-commercial use and then defines commercial use with four tests. You are commercial if any one of them is true:
- You use the platform for any purpose beyond investment analysis, research, testing and monitoring that is private and individual in nature.
- You are using it as, or on behalf of, a corporation, firm, partnership, trust or other association rather than as an individual.
- You provide information accessed through the platform as part of commercial activity that lets anyone other than you access it directly or indirectly, even outside the securities industry.
- You are employed by or affiliated with a financial planning advisor, insurance company, investment advisor, investment bank, money manager, registered representative or securities broker dealer.
Read the third test carefully. Letting anyone other than you see the data, indirectly, as part of commercial activity, is the definition of a public app with a price on it. The free key and the $249.99 a month premium key sit under the same personal licence; the market data policy sends personal users to the subscribe page and business users to a contact form for onboarding.
Twelve Data
Twelve Data is the clearest in the industry and still almost never cited. It runs two pricing pages. The individual page is headed, in a single line under the title, access the data for personal, internal and non-commercial purposes. The business page is headed access data for commercial, external and professional use.
The same free Basic tier appears on both pages, and on both it is limited to internal non-display usage. That is the single most useful fact in this article: the free plan does not become commercial by being listed on the business page.
Massive, formerly Polygon
Massive labels every individual plan with an Individual use badge, from the $0 end of day tier to the $199 a month real-time tier, and the real-time one adds Non-pros only. Companies are sent to a separate business price list where the equivalent plan is $2,499 a month.
CoinGecko, Marketstack and EODHD
For crypto, CoinGecko's free Demo plan carries an attribution requirement and is not a commercial licence; Basic at $35 a month is, which makes it the cheapest commercial crypto licence in common use. Marketstack prints Non-Commercial Use on its free card and Commercial Use from $9.99 a month. EODHD splits its pricing into Personal and Commercial tabs, where the commercial internal-use plan is $399 a month against $99.99 for the personal all-in-one plan: the same data, four times the price, because of the licence.
Display, Non-Display and Why They Decide Your Bill
Exchange licensing splits usage into two families, and every price above is really a price for one of them.
| Term | What it means | Typical app |
|---|---|---|
| Non-display | A machine reads the data and nobody sees the number. Signals, alerts, risk checks, backtests | A screener that emails you a shortlist |
| Internal display | A human inside your organisation sees the number on a screen | A dashboard your own team opens |
| External display | A human outside your organisation sees the number | A public app, a client portal, a published chart |
| External distribution | You pass the data on so others can store or re-serve it | An API of your own, a data export, a webhook feed |
Twelve Data maps those four words onto four price points with no ambiguity at all: Basic is internal non-display at $0, Grow is internal display at $79, Venture is external display at $499 and Enterprise is external distribution at $1,099. If you want one sentence to carry away from this article, it is that the price is set by who sees the number, not by how many calls you make.
This is also why call-quota comparisons mislead. Quota and licence are separate axes, and most comparison posts only measure one of them. The quota maths for a live dashboard, including how to cache around a tight free tier, is worked through in our guide to building a trading dashboard with live market data.
End of Day, Delayed and Real-Time Are Three Different Licences
Latency is not a performance setting. It is a licensing tier, and it is the one that drags exchange rules into your project.
- End of day: a single settled price per symbol per day. The least restricted data in the category, and the only kind several free tiers offer. Massive's $0 plan is end of day only.
- 15-minute delayed: the first tier that is exchange-regulated in most markets. Alpha Vantage's $49.99 a month plan is where delayed US data starts for a personal subscriber.
- Real-time: exchange-licensed, audited, and priced accordingly. Massive adds Non-pros only to its $199 real-time plan for exactly this reason.
Alpha Vantage's market data policy spells out the mechanism better than any third-party page: real-time and 15-minute delayed US market data is regulated by the exchanges, and a provider must be licensed by the exchanges before it can distribute that data to you. The same page warns that a provider offering free real-time data is most likely redistributing it without a licence, and that consuming it can expose the consumer to fines or penalties, not only the provider.
The specific regulators and exchanges named on those pages are the US ones, because US equities are what these providers mostly sell. The structure is the same wherever you are: the exchange owns the feed, the vendor licenses it, and your rights come from the vendor's licence, not from the fact that a URL returned JSON. Check the rules of the market whose data you are consuming before you assume a tier applies to it.
The Professional Test You Will Have to Pass
Several providers do not take your word for it. Massive publishes the questionnaire it uses to classify subscribers, and it is the most concrete statement of the rule anywhere in the category. Answer no to the first question or yes to any of the other ten, and you are a professional subscriber who cannot buy an individual plan.
The ten disqualifying questions include whether you receive the data for your business or any other entity, whether you provide investment advice to anyone, whether you are engaged as an asset manager, whether you use anyone else's capital in your trading, whether you trade for the benefit of a company or partnership, and whether you have agreed to share the profit of your trading or be compensated for it.
Three consequences catch independent developers who assume they are safely non-professional:
- A limited company you own is still an entity. Receiving data through it makes you professional.
- The account has to be in your own name. Signing up with your company's details makes you professional even if the use really is personal.
- An investment club cannot hold a non-professional subscription at all, because it is not a natural person. Its individual members still can.
Trading on margin is explicitly fine. Being paid for your trading, or trading other people's money, is not. Retired professionals can requalify as non-professional once they are listed as not registered, and the obligation to tell the vendor when your status changes sits with you.
Decision Tree: Which Licence Your Project Needs
Work down this table until a row describes what you are building. The first match is your tier.
| What you are building | Who sees the data | Licence you need | Realistic monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| A dashboard only you open | You | Personal or individual, free tier is fine | $0 |
| A screener that emails you a shortlist | You, and only as a machine output | Personal, non-display | $0 to $29 |
| A tool your own company's staff open | Colleagues inside your organisation | Commercial internal display | $79 to $399 |
| A free public app or a published chart | Anyone on the internet | Commercial external display | $499 and up |
| A paid product or client portal | Your customers | Commercial external display, often with redistribution | $499 to $2,499 |
| Your own API, export or data feed | Third parties who can re-serve it | External distribution, negotiated | $1,099 and up |
Two refinements. First, free and paid make no difference to the licence: a free public app is still external display, and several providers' terms turn on whether anyone other than you can see the data, not on whether you charge for it. Second, an internal tool is genuinely cheaper than a public one, so if the business case allows an internal dashboard rather than a public page, the licence bill falls by an order of magnitude.
Yahoo Finance Has No Official Public API
This is the most common and most expensive mistake in the category. Yahoo Finance does not publish a public API for developers. The libraries that appear in every listicle work by calling endpoints that power Yahoo's own website.
The most widely used of them, yfinance, says so itself in its own README: it is not affiliated, endorsed or vetted by Yahoo, it is intended for research and educational purposes, and, in bold on the project page, the Yahoo Finance API is intended for personal use only.
The distinction that trips people up is between the code and the data. The library is released under the Apache licence, so you may freely use the library. That licence says nothing about the data it returns, which belongs to Yahoo and its own data suppliers. An open-source client does not grant you rights in the content it fetches.
For a weekend project this is a risk you can decide to carry. For a product with customers it is not, for three reasons: the endpoints are undocumented and change without notice, there is no service level and no support, and there is no licence to point at if anyone asks. Any product that needs to answer a due-diligence question about its data source needs a named provider and an invoice.
What Going Commercial Actually Costs
Here is the jump, provider by provider, as priced on 1 October 2026. The multiples are the reason this article exists.
| Provider | Best individual or free option | Equivalent commercial option | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketstack | Free, 100 requests a month | Basic, $9.99 a month | Cheapest step up in the category |
| CoinGecko | Demo, free with attribution | Basic, $35 a month | Cheapest commercial crypto licence |
| Twelve Data | Grow, $79 a month internal display | Venture, $499 a month external display | About 6x |
| EODHD | All-in-one personal, $99.99 a month | Commercial internal use, $399 a month | 4x |
| Massive | Stocks Advanced, $199 a month | Stocks Business, $2,499 a month | About 12.5x |
Massive's gap is the one to plan around. Twelve and a half times is not a tier change, it is a different business model, and discovering it after you have built on the individual plan is how side projects die. Massive does publish a startup discount of 25 percent or more in the first year for qualifying companies, and Twelve Data offers startup and student discounts and free access for non-profits, so ask before you assume the list price is the price.
Budget the licence before you budget the build. A data licence is a recurring cost that scales with your ambition, while the app itself is mostly a one-time effort. We worked through the same logic on the product side in what it really costs to sell an app you built with Lovable.
A Checklist Before You Ship
- Open the provider's own terms page and the pricing page, and read the licence line on the plan card. Do not trust a comparison post, including this one, without checking.
- Write down which of the four usage families you are in: non-display, internal display, external display or distribution.
- Decide your latency tier honestly. If end of day is enough, say so, because it is the cheapest and least restricted data you can buy.
- Check whether you would pass the professional test. A company, an advisory relationship or shared trading profits all push you out of individual plans.
- Check the retention clause. Finnhub requires deletion of all data when the subscription ends, which conflicts with a product that keeps history.
- Check the attribution clause. CoinGecko's free tier requires visible credit, which is a design decision, not just a legal one.
- Keep the invoice and a dated copy of the terms you relied on. If anyone ever asks about your data rights, that file is the answer.
None of this is legal advice. It is a reading of published terms on a single date by someone who builds these apps. Read the provider's terms yourself, and take proper advice before you rely on data rights in a commercial product.
Building the App Once the Licence Is Sorted
The licence is the hard part. The app is not. Once you know which tier you are on and what your key is allowed to do, a market data front end is a well-understood build: fetch on a schedule, cache aggressively to respect the quota, store the series you are allowed to store, and render it.
Teams increasingly build these interfaces with Lovable, which is where this site's experience sits. The relevant plan question for a data product is not credits, it is who can open the app. On the free and Pro plans anyone with the link can open a published app and access cannot be restricted, which is a licensing problem as much as a security one: an internal tool that anyone can open is not an internal tool, and your licence may well be priced as though it were. The Business plan adds restricted publishing, workspace-only apps and role-based access, which is what keeps an internal display licence honest.
If you want that reviewed before you commit, TJ Alam's Lovable Expert listing is the place to start, and our verdict on the platform covers where it fits and where it does not.
Related reading on this site: how to keep financial data safe in a Lovable app, what a Lovable MVP really costs in credits, the trade-offs between the main AI app builders for fintech, and how to build a trading journal app where the maths matters more than the feed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a genuinely free stock API for commercial use?
Not among the mainstream providers. Every well-known free tier is licensed for personal, individual or internal non-commercial use. The closest thing to a free commercial option is a very cheap paid one: Marketstack's $9.99 a month Basic plan prints Commercial Use on the card, and CoinGecko's $35 a month Basic plan includes a commercial licence for crypto.
How much does Alpha Vantage cost for commercial use?
Alpha Vantage does not publish a commercial price. Its premium plans run from $49.99 a month for 75 requests a minute with 15-minute delayed US data up to $249.99 a month for 1,200 requests a minute with real-time data, but all of those sit under the personal, non-commercial licence. For business use the market data policy directs you to contact the company for a data onboarding process, which means a quote rather than a checkout.
Can I use Yahoo Finance data in a commercial app?
There is no official public Yahoo Finance API to license, and the most popular library for reaching its endpoints states in its own README that the API is intended for personal use only. The library's open-source licence covers the code, not the data. For anything with customers, use a provider that will sell you a commercial licence and an invoice.
What is the difference between display and non-display data?
Non-display means a machine consumes the number and no human sees it, as in a signal, an alert or a backtest. Display means a human reads it on a screen, and it is split again into internal display for your own staff and external display for anyone outside your organisation. Providers price these separately, and external display is usually several times the internal price.
Does it matter whether my app is free to use?
Usually not. Several providers define commercial use by whether anyone other than you can access the data, directly or indirectly, rather than by whether you charge for it. A free public app showing prices is normally external display and needs a commercial licence just as a paid one does.
What counts as a professional subscriber?
Broadly: anyone registered or qualified with a securities regulator, anyone giving investment advice, asset managers, anyone trading with other people's capital or for a company's benefit, and anyone sharing in or being paid for trading profits. Receiving the data through a company rather than in your own name also counts. Professional subscribers must use business plans regardless of how personal the use feels.
References
- Finnhub, Terms of Service
- Alpha Vantage, Terms of Service (PDF)
- Alpha Vantage, Market Data Policy Overview
- Alpha Vantage, Premium API Key plans
- Twelve Data, Pricing for Individual
- Twelve Data, Pricing for Business
- Massive, Pricing
- Massive, Business pricing
- Massive, Understanding Professional Status
- CoinGecko, API pricing
- Marketstack, Pricing
- EODHD, Pricing
- yfinance, project README
- Lovable, Pricing
All provider pages opened and re-read in a browser on 1 October 2026.
About the Author
TJ Alam is a certified Lovable Expert (Website Builder track) and the founder of Digi Flock Enterprises. He built tjalam.com and cyberdance.in with Lovable, and writes about the practical side of shipping finance tools: what the data costs, what the licence allows, and what breaks in production. You can find his Expert profile in the Lovable partner directory.
MoneyFlock may earn a commission if you subscribe to a Lovable Business plan through links in this article, at no extra cost to you. TJ Alam is a certified Lovable Expert.