The State of Market Data APIs

About this paper

In market data, the feed is the commodity and the operation is the moat. A quote is a quote, a bar is a bar, an end-of-day file is an end-of-day file — every provider in the upper band ships the same bedrock resources and competes on the three axes a commodity always competes on: price, latency, and coverage. The durable money is somewhere else, and most of this report is about where.

I read fifty-eight providers the way a machine reads them — the OpenAPI, the scopes, the security posture, the agent surfaces — and scored every one on the same rubric I apply to Stripe, concentrating on the twenty-eight in the upper three bands. Written for two readers: the person building or running a market data product who needs to know where they stand against the field, and the investor trying to tell a durable data business from a soon-to-be-commoditized feed. The providers winning the upper band — Alpaca, Polygon, EODHD, and the rest — are the ones treating the API operation as the product and the data as the commodity input it has become. The franchises with elite data and a bare API are telling you, in machine-checkable signal, exactly where they’ll be when the agentic consumer routes around them. This report reads that signal, provider by provider, and hands you the punch-list.

What's inside

1. Executive summary — the feed is the commodity, the operation is the moat
2. The state of the sector — a commodity feed with a real frontier
3. The resource taxonomy — bedrock commodities and the real frontier
4. The composite Kin Score — and why it's the foundation
5. Agent-readiness — the field is separating here
6. The blueprint — what the leaders satisfied, and what none of them have
7. Standards and artifacts — why this matters for the agentic turn
8. Security, auth, scopes, and compliance posture
9. Provider-by-provider intelligence — the upper band
10. The investable thesis — where the durable value hides

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