Real Time Stock API: 19 Providers of Live Prices, Ranked

A real time stock API sells one of three things: the full consolidated SIP tape, one exchange’s own feed such as IEX, or a price derived from one of those, the way our own SmartMid is. We ranked 19 real-time stock APIs and priced what each one actually costs to reach, not just its cheapest plan.

We sell the derived kind. Our API’s real-time stock price is SmartMid, an IEX-based midpoint, from the Starter plan at $12 a month billed annually. The scorecards below show where that trade-off costs us points against a raw exchange feed.

A developer wiring up a real time stock market API for the first time usually starts by asking which of those three feeds a given provider actually sells, since that answer decides both the price and the license.

How did we rank the real-time stock APIs?

Each provider was scored from 0 to 10 on six criteria: the feed itself, its cost, how it’s delivered, the breadth of markets it reaches, its licensing terms, and independent review quality. Feed and cost count double, because price swings from free to $825 a month across these 19 providers once the data itself is live.

A 10 is the best offering among these 19 providers, and a 0 means a provider doesn’t sell it at all. Alpaca ranks first here on a free IEX feed; we rank fourth.

Which real time stock API ranks best?

The six highest-ranked providers, side by side:

Alpaca

Alpaca’s Basic brokerage plan gives free, real-time IEX equities with websocket streaming, no card required beyond opening the account. Full-SIP equities and real OPRA options both live on the $99-a-month Algo Trader Plus plan, one price for both.

Databento

Databento sells the real thing: consolidated real-time quotes and trades across 15 exchanges and 30 ATSs, nanosecond timestamped. DBEQ Basic, its flat real-time plan, is $825 a month, and it states plainly that it does not compute options greeks.

Tradier

Tradier is a broker. Real-time equities and OPRA options, with ORATS greeks refreshed hourly, come free with any Tradier brokerage account, $0 minimum deposit. That undercuts every API on this list, provided you’re willing to open one.

Market Data

Our SmartMid price starts at $12 a month billed annually, on the Starter plan, and it’s the cheapest way onto this list to a real-time US stock price. It’s a derived midpoint sourced from IEX, not raw NBBO, and we have no websocket: every call is a poll.

Finnhub

Finnhub streams real-time US SIP quotes over websocket with no separate real-time SKU, but it sells zero options endpoints of any kind, and its published reviews are the weakest here.

Massive

Massive, formerly Polygon.io, puts real-time stocks, options, indices and futures all on one $199-a-month Advanced plan. It’s the broadest single plan on this list if you need more than US equities.

What does real-time access cost, stocks alone and stocks with options?

Comparable access, the sum of every plan an account actually needs:

Alpaca’s IEX feed is free; ours is the cheapest paid one, at $12 a month billed annually. Adding real-time options changes the ranking:

Tradier’s brokerage account still wins on price. Past that, our Trader plan, $30 a month billed annually, is the cheapest way to combine real-time stocks and OPRA options with greeks in one account.

Why does one exchange’s feed cost so much less than the full tape?

Because it covers less. A single-exchange feed like IEX reports one venue’s own quotes; the full SIP tape consolidates every exchange’s quotes into the official NBBO, and exchanges charge accordingly.

A commercial Android app developer, already on our Trader plan, told us in February 2025 he’d found Nasdaq’s own last-sale feed quoted at $1,500 a month, offered to him at $500 with a trial, plus $1 per retail user, and that adding bid/ask roughly doubled the base fee. That’s the SIP-adjacent tier priced directly by an exchange, not through a reseller.

Real-time access on any of these plans, ours included, is priced for one non-professional person or app, not a business serving other people’s users. Turning ours on, even after paying, still takes the OPRA subscriber agreement and a Data Use Interview self-certifying non-professional status, typically cleared within a business day.

Why is our real-time API limited to one IP address?

The exchanges treat a data product as controlled when the vendor can show that one customer device at a time reads the data and none of it is passed on. That status is what keeps our real-time prices low, so each account accepts one IP address and no serverless functions.

The rule has a cost, and we have watched it. In September 2026 a customer calling our API from Google Apps Script, whose outbound IP addresses rotate, hit the limit. We explained why and pointed him to our Sheets add-on, which refreshes safely. Thirty-three minutes later he wrote that Massive allowed his setup, and asked us to cancel.

What do we do when a real-time app shows prices to other people?

We stopped selling to business customers ourselves in February 2025, when IEX ended free redistribution of real-time stock prices for business use. From then on, every business plan carried exchange fees per customer and compliance work our small team could not carry.

So we refer commercial buyers to our partner Intrinio. Between 1 and 25 September 2026 we sent it 22 commercial enquiries, about one a day. The test we apply is display: if other people see the prices, or scores built from them, the use is commercial.

Which real-time feed would we buy for a personal dashboard?

For one person’s dashboard, we would buy a derived or single-exchange price and spend the difference elsewhere. The consolidated SIP matters when an order depends on the national best bid and offer, and a chart that refreshes every few seconds rarely does.

That is the reasoning behind our own SmartMid, and it is also why Alpaca’s free IEX feed ranks first here.

When should you not use Market Data for real-time stock prices?

Use another provider if you need the raw consolidated tape, websocket streaming, or a feed licensed for redistribution to your own users. Alpaca, Databento and Massive fit those jobs better here. Our commercial customers go through our partner Intrinio instead, a routing we set up after IEX ended free redistribution of real-time prices for business use.

Our own real-time stock data page details what SmartMid does and doesn’t cover, and the overall ranking of financial data providers compares all 19 on more than freshness. For a narrower budget question, our free stock API ranking covers what’s free before you need real-time at all. Alpaca’s own market data page lists the exact plans named above.