metals-api.com

What It Is

Metals-API is a JSON API for developers that provides prices for precious metals, metals, fiat currencies, and cryptocurrencies. It covers gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and data related to sources such as LME/LBMA, supporting use cases including latest prices, historical prices, time series, volatility/fluctuation, conversions, Bid/Ask, OHLC, and gold/silver prices in Indian cities. The official site claims support for 612+ symbols and 185+ currencies, with data sourced from banks, financial data providers, and venues such as LME, COMEX, LBMA, CME, NYSE, SMM, INDIA, and CBOE.

Core Capabilities and Developer Experience

From a developer tooling perspective, its main strength is a clear API structure: a Base URL, access_key authentication, and standard JSON responses. The documentation also explains that, under a USD base, some metal prices need to be read as 1/value. It lists 14 categories of endpoints and supports SSL, JSONP, CORS, and HTTP ETags, making it easier to call from front-end applications and optimize caching. Sample code is provided for PHP, Python, JavaScript, Node.js, Go, Ruby, Java, C#, Rust, Kotlin, and Swift, along with a WordPress plugin and Drupal module, so the integration barrier is relatively low. The material does not show an official SDK, nor does it provide information about self-hosted deployment.

Pricing

Pricing is based on tiered subscriptions. Monthly plans range from $19.99/month to $999/month, annual plans range from $199/year to $9999/year, and the enterprise plan starts at $25,000/year. The main differences between plans are monthly request volume, number of symbols per request, date ranges for Time-Series/Fluctuation, update frequency, and rate limits. Lower-cost plans update from every 10 minutes, while higher-tier plans can update every 60 seconds. Overage requests are charged at $0.032435 per call, and Soft Limit is enabled by default. This is suitable for teams with monitoring in place; otherwise, it may lead to additional charges.

Pros and Cons

The advantages are broad coverage of data categories and endpoints, solid documentation, and ample multilingual examples, making it suitable for quickly integrating commodity market data. Enterprise plans also support SLA, a dedicated account manager, priority support, WebSocket, and API customization. The drawbacks are that the free allowance is unclear, lower-priced plans have many limitations, same-day fluctuation is not provided and must be stored on your own schedule, and the open-source status is unclear. Although the FAQ says it was originally a lightweight Open-Source API, there is no repository or self-hosting documentation.

Who It’s For and Access from China

Metals-API is suitable for financial information websites, precious metals e-commerce platforms, market dashboards, internal quotation systems, WordPress/Drupal sites, and development teams that need LME/LBMA historical data. The text does not provide information on access from China. Payments are processed by Stripe, so teams in mainland China should evaluate network connectivity, foreign-currency credit card payment, and compliance of data sources on their own. If access or payment is restricted, domestic financial data providers or exchange-authorized market data may be alternatives.