Divergence Software Blog: IEX Developer Platform

Up until recently if you wanted access to free price data you had at least a couple of options, namely the API's made available by Yahoo Finance and Google Finance. Unfortunately, in both cases, the service has been discontinued.

We found this out a few days ago when we ventured out to build a streaming quotes ticker for our web site. After a lot of digging around on the web and a lot of dead ends we stumbled across IEX, a stock market exchange platform that was introduced in 2016. Their story is an interesting one and you should check out some of the articles on their blog.

It turns out they also offer a free data API (IEX API) for developers and engineers. It is extremely easy to use, it is absolutely free, requires no paperwork, and they offer realtime and historical data.

They currently support GET requests (via SSL which is nice) and have limited support for WebSockets. All requests are returned in JSON format. Their list of supported symbols is available here (sorry, no currency data available...at least not yet).

Obviously no guarantees in terms of how long the IEX free data will be available but it is a good choice if you need to build something now. You can check out the streaming quotes ticker we built using javascript, bootstrap, and the IEX data on our home page.