A Free TwelveData Alternative Without Credit Metering
TwelveData is a polished API, but its free tier is metered in credits — a handful of API credits per minute and a daily cap (8/min and 800/day at the time of writing), with WebSocket access held back for paid plans. If your project is a dashboard, a bot or a widget that polls live FX, metals or crypto prices all day, credits are exactly the wrong shape. biquote has no credits, no key and no signup.
Side by side
| biquote (free) | TwelveData (free) | |
|---|---|---|
| API key / signup | none | required |
| Metering | 15,000 req/min per IP, flat | credit system, per-minute + per-day caps |
| WebSocket streaming | free, unmetered | paid plans |
| Forex / gold / crypto quotes | real-time, ~280 live instruments | yes, within credit limits |
| OHLC candles | 1m to 1d intervals | yes, within credit limits |
| Economic calendar | 54 countries, free | — |
| Embeddable widgets | 12 widgets, one script tag | — |
| Exchange-listed equities, fundamentals | — (CFD quotes only) | yes, broad coverage |
Polling every second is fine here
# One quote, no key
curl https://biquote.io/api/EURUSD
# 20 symbols in one round-trip (repeated param)
curl "https://biquote.io/api/latest?symbols=EURUSD&symbols=XAUUSD&symbols=BTCUSD"At 15,000 requests/min per IP, a dashboard polling 20 symbols once a second uses under 1% of the allowance — and the SignalR WebSocket at /hubs/tick removes polling entirely. Client libraries: pip install biquote, npm install biquote. Full reference in the API docs.
When TwelveData is still the right choice
Honesty section: biquote is CFD pricing from a MetaTrader 5 broker feed — no exchange-licensed equities, no fundamentals, no last/volume fields (use mid), and history is OHLC candles rather than decades of adjusted daily bars. If you need Tokyo-listed stocks or dividend-adjusted history, TwelveData earns its price. If you need live FX, gold and crypto without watching a credit meter, biquote is the simpler tool.