Fundamentals Hub
Which financial data API should you actually build on? The answer depends on what you need, what you can spend, and how much data cleanup you're willing to do yourself.
This comparison covers six financial data API providers that developers and analysts reach for when they need fundamental financial data: SEC EDGAR (direct), Alpha Vantage, Financial Modeling Prep, SimFin, Intrinio, and Fundamentals Hub. Each serves a different slice of the market. Some bundle everything from crypto prices to earnings transcripts. Others focus narrowly on standardized financial statements. The pricing ranges from free to $9,600 per year.
This is not a ranking. It is a decision framework. The right financial data API depends on your use case, your budget, and one factor most comparisons skip: whether you can actually use the data commercially.
What "Financial Data API" Covers in This Comparison
- Financial Data API
- A programmatic interface returning fundamental financial data (income statements, balance sheets, cash flows) for public companies via JSON endpoints.
- XBRL Normalization
- The process of mapping inconsistent XBRL tags from SEC filings into a consistent, canonical set of financial fields across all companies.
- Commercial Use Rights
- Whether a provider's terms allow you to redistribute, resell, or display their data in a commercial product without a separate license.
A financial data API, as used here, means a programmatic interface that returns fundamental financial data: income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements for public companies. Some of these providers also offer market prices, news feeds, or alternative data. This comparison evaluates them only on their fundamentals coverage, because that is the hardest part to get right and the easiest place to waste time.
If you need real-time stock prices, this is not the comparison for you. If you need clean revenue, net income, and free cash flow numbers for US public companies, read on.
The Six Providers Compared
Six providers cover the spectrum from free raw data to enterprise-grade services. Each makes different tradeoffs on price, coverage, normalization quality, and commercial use rights.
SEC EDGAR Direct: Free, Raw, Painful
Cost: $0
Coverage: All SEC filers (~8,000+ companies)
Rate limit: 10 req/sec by IP
SEC EDGAR is the original source. Every other provider on this list pulls from it. The XBRL APIs at data.sec.gov give you every tagged financial fact for every public company, going back to 2009. No API key required. No cost.
The catch is data quality. "Revenue" appears under four different XBRL tags depending on the company. Some Q2 and Q3 flow facts are year-to-date rather than standalone. There is no Q4 10-Q, so derive each additive Q4 flow as the full-year 10-K value minus Q1, Q2, and Q3. CIKs need zero-padding to 10 digits. You will spend weeks building a normalization layer before the data is usable for comparison across companies. For a full walkthrough, see our SEC EDGAR API guide.
Commercial use: Unrestricted. SEC EDGAR data is public. You can use it in commercial products, redistribute it, or build a paid service on top of it. The only constraint is SEC's fair access policy (10 req/sec, declared User-Agent).
Best for: Developers who want raw source data and are comfortable building their own pipeline.
Alpha Vantage: Broad but Fundamentals Are Secondary
Cost: Free (25 req/day), Premium from $49.99/mo (75-1,200 req/min, no daily cap)
Coverage: US and international equities
Commercial use: Restricted, no redistribution without separate license
Alpha Vantage covers stock prices, forex, crypto, technical indicators, and fundamentals under one roof. The free tier gives you 25 requests per day, enough for testing but tight for anything real. Premium plans jump to per-minute limits (75 req/min and up) with no daily cap, which is a significant step up.
The fundamental data endpoints return income statements, balance sheets, and cash flows, but normalization quality is inconsistent. Field names vary between endpoints, and some companies have gaps in quarterly data. Response times can lag during peak hours. If you need prices and indicators with basic fundamentals and want a single vendor, Alpha Vantage works. If fundamentals accuracy is your priority, look elsewhere.
Financial Modeling Prep: Everything, All at Once
Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) is the kitchen-sink option: 150+ endpoints covering fundamentals, prices, news, earnings transcripts, SEC filings, crypto, forex, and economic data. If you want one API key for everything, this is it.
What it costs: Free tier gives 250 calls/day. Paid starts at $22/mo (Starter, billed annually) with 300 req/min. Premium runs $59/mo, Ultimate $149/mo. Each tier unlocks more history depth and coverage rather than more endpoint types.
Where it falls short: You pay for the full platform even if you only need fundamentals. Data quality on fundamentals is solid for large-cap US companies but can be sparse for smaller filers. FMP's terms state that "displaying or redistributing data requires a specific Data Display and Licensing Agreement," so building a product that serves FMP data to your customers needs a separate commercial deal.
FMP's free tier (250 requests per day) is the most generous among paid providers, making it a strong option for prototyping before committing.
SimFin: Clean Fundamentals, Credit-Based Pricing
Cost: Free (5,000 US stocks, 5yr history), $15-$71/mo for deeper access
Coverage: 5,000 US stocks across all tiers
Commercial use: Free tier is personal/academic only. Commercial requires paid plan + permission.
SimFin stands out for data quality. Their team manually curates standardized financial statements, which means normalization is more consistent than providers that rely solely on automated XBRL parsing. Cleaner data, fewer gaps.
The free tier covers 5,000 US stocks with 5 years of history and 500 high-speed credits per month, enough to evaluate thoroughly. Paid tiers ($15/mo Start, $35/mo Basic, $71/mo Pro) extend history to 10-20+ years and increase credits but do not add more companies. The credit-based system means different endpoints cost different amounts, which makes predicting monthly spend harder than simple request-count pricing.
If you need curated accuracy over raw coverage and your use case is US equities, SimFin delivers. The tradeoff is that 5,000 stocks is fewer than the ~8,000+ SEC filers indexed by providers that pull every filing.
Intrinio: Institutional Grade, Institutional Price
Intrinio serves a different market than the rest of this list. US Fundamentals starts at $9,600/yr. Delivery options include API, CSV, Snowflake, and S3. History goes back to 2006. The data quality is excellent, and all plans are licensed for business use, meaning commercial redistribution is permitted within your contract terms.
There is no permanent free tier, but Intrinio does offer free trials for each product, so you can evaluate before signing a contract. The barrier is purely financial: $9,600 per year prices out side projects and startup MVPs. If your company has the budget and needs institutional-grade data with SLA guarantees, dedicated support, and deep history, Intrinio is the obvious choice.
Fundamentals Hub: Focused, Free, SEC Source Data
Cost: Free (no paid tier yet)
Coverage: 8,000+ SEC filers
Rate limit: 1/min, 5/hour, 10/day, 100/30 days
Fundamentals Hub takes a narrower approach. It provides standardized income statements, balance sheets, and cash flows sourced from SEC EDGAR filings, delivered as clean JSON through seven API endpoints. No prices, no news, no crypto. Fundamentals only.
What you are paying for (even at $0) is the normalization layer. The API handles XBRL tag mapping (50+ tags resolved to 23 canonical fields), per-field YTD normalization, Q4 derivation from the annual filing, and calculations like free cash flow and total debt. The same data you would spend weeks extracting from SEC EDGAR directly comes back as a single JSON response per company.
The current rate limits (1 request per minute, 100 per 30 days) are enough for testing, prototyping, and light production use. These limits will change as the platform scales availability, adds features, and introduces paid tiers.
Commercial use: Permissive. The underlying data is public SEC EDGAR filings. The free tier covers personal projects, prototypes, and small commercial integrations. For large-scale redistribution or products that resell the data as their core value, reach out at hi@fundamentalshub.com first.
Best for: Developers and analysts who need clean US fundamentals and want to start building without a credit card or subscription.
Pricing Breakdown: What You Actually Pay
| Provider | Free Tier | Starter Paid | Commercial Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEC EDGAR | Unlimited (raw) | N/A | Unrestricted (public data) |
| Alpha Vantage | 25 req/day | $49.99/mo | No redistribution |
| Financial Modeling Prep | 250 req/day | $22/mo | Requires display license |
| SimFin | 5,000 stocks (5yr) | $15/mo | Paid plans only, no redistribution |
| Intrinio | Free trial only | $9,600/yr | Business use included |
| Fundamentals Hub | 100 req/30 days | N/A (paid tiers coming) | Permissive (small scale) |
Pricing reflects publicly listed plans as of January 2026 and may have changed since publication. Verify current pricing on each provider's site before committing.
Three observations from this table:
Free tiers vary wildly. SEC EDGAR is unlimited but requires you to build the entire normalization stack. FMP gives 250 requests per day with clean data. Alpha Vantage gives 25. Fundamentals Hub gives 100 per 30 days with normalized data. SimFin gives 5,000 stocks with 5 years of history. Intrinio offers free trials but no permanent free access.
"Cheap" depends on what you are building. SimFin at $15/mo and FMP at $22/mo are the lowest paid entry points. FMP bundles 150+ endpoints you may never call. SimFin uses credits that make cost prediction harder. Fundamentals Hub is currently free with no paid tier, though that will change as the platform scales.
Commercial usage rights are the hidden differentiator. If you are building a product that displays, resells, or redistributes financial data, most providers restrict this behind commercial licenses or enterprise contracts. SEC EDGAR (public data) and Fundamentals Hub are the only options that permit small-scale commercial use on a free tier; bulk redistribution is best cleared in advance with Fundamentals Hub. This matters less for internal analytics and more for anyone building a fintech product, a stock screener, or a SaaS tool that shows financial data to end users.
How to Choose: Decision Framework
Skip the feature matrix. Answer these three questions instead:
1. Do you need more than fundamentals?
If yes - prices, news, crypto, technical indicators - consider FMP or Alpha Vantage. Both bundle multiple data types. FMP has better fundamentals coverage; Alpha Vantage has more indicator endpoints.
2. How much engineering time can you invest?
If you want raw data and full control, SEC EDGAR direct costs $0 but demands weeks of pipeline work. If you want clean data immediately, any of the paid providers eliminates the normalization problem. Fundamentals Hub and SimFin are the most focused on standardized fundamentals.
3. What is your budget constraint?
$0: SEC EDGAR (raw, DIY) or Fundamentals Hub (normalized, 100 req/30 days, paid tiers coming).
Under $50/mo: SimFin ($15/mo, credit-based) or FMP ($22/mo, everything bundled).
$50-$100/mo: FMP ($59/mo Premium, broad) or Alpha Vantage ($49-$99/mo, broad).
Enterprise: Intrinio ($9,600/yr+), or enterprise tiers of the above.