A Free Finnhub Alternative for Forex & Gold
Finnhub's free tier is genuinely good for US stocks — but reach for forex or gold candles and you meet the paywall: FX and commodity data largely sit in the paid plans, and the free key is capped at 60 calls/min. If the part of Finnhub you actually wanted was currencies and metals, biquote serves exactly that slice free, with no key at all.
Side by side
| biquote (free) | Finnhub (free) | |
|---|---|---|
| API key / signup | none | required |
| Rate limit | 15,000 req/min per IP | 60 calls/min (as of writing) |
| Forex & gold quotes/candles | real-time, free | largely paid |
| Crypto quotes | real-time CFD pricing | yes |
| WebSocket streaming | free, unmetered, all instruments | US stocks & crypto trades |
| Economic calendar | 54 countries, free | paid |
| Embeddable widgets | 12 widgets, one script tag | — |
| US stock quotes, fundamentals, news sentiment | — (CFD quotes only) | yes — its real strength |
Gold candles, no key
curl "https://biquote.io/api/XAUUSD/ohlc?interval=15m&limit=200"
curl https://biquote.io/api/EURUSD
curl "https://biquote.io/api/calendar?countries=US,EU&importance=high"Streaming works the same way for every instrument: connect SignalR to /hubs/tick, invoke Subscribe with your symbols, receive ticks as they happen. Client libraries: pip install biquote, npm install biquote. Full reference in the API docs.
When Finnhub is still the right choice
Honesty section: biquote is CFD pricing from a MetaTrader 5 broker feed, not exchange-licensed data. No official NASDAQ/NYSE quotes, no fundamentals, no earnings or sentiment endpoints, and no last/volume on ticks (use mid). For US-equity work Finnhub's free tier is hard to beat. For live FX, metals and crypto at real request volumes, that is biquote's home ground.