Credits and Pricing

Every retail v1.1 data call is paid for in credits from your plan's monthly allowance (see the plans on Ortex APIs). Enterprise endpoints (/api/v11/enterprise/…) are not charged in credits.

How a call is charged

A call is charged per page of results served:

cost of a page = base cost + min(rows on the page × per-row cost, cap)

The cap is 500 credits on single-stock, feed and catalog endpoints and 1,500 on bulk endpoints.

• Rows are the rows in data on that page. Requesting the next page is a separate charge.
• Fields and format do not change the price. A CSV response costs the same as JSON.
• The row-based part of a page is capped (500, or 1,500 on bulk), so no single page costs more than its base cost plus the cap.
• A call that finds nothing costs 0.05: a page with no rows, or a 404 such as an unknown stock. See What is charged.
• The amount charged is in every response: meta.credits.used (this page) and meta.credits.remaining (your balance), or the Ortex-Credits-Used and Ortex-Credits-Remaining headers on a CSV response.

Standard prices

Each endpoint's exact price is also published in the API specification, as the x-ortex-credits extension on every operation:

"x-ortex-credits": {
  "charged": true,
  "chargedPer": "page",
  "baseCost": 0.95,
  "perRow": 0.05,
  "maxRowCostPerPage": 500,
  "maxPerPage": 500.95,
  "freeStocksUncharged": true,
  "noDataCost": 0.05
}

A client, including an AI assistant using the ORTEX MCP server, can read it to work out the most a call can cost before making it.

Bulk is never dearer than single-stock calls

A bulk call for many stocks on one date never costs more than calling the single-stock endpoint for each of those stocks on that date. Bulk has no base cost, so it costs 0.05 per stock row, against at least 0.15 (and 1.00 for the short-interest family) for one stock's single-stock call. An empty bulk page costs 0.05, the same as an empty single-stock call.

Free stocks and the TEST key

• A small set of listings is free on the single-stock endpoints; their rows are also not charged when they appear in a bulk response.
• The TEST key is never charged (see Authentication).

Working out the most a call can cost

1. Find the endpoint's price in the table above or in x-ortex-credits.
2. Bound the number of rows.
   • A single-stock series returns at most one row per date in your window for most endpoints (some, such as ESMA positions or consensus estimates, return several rows per date).
   • A bulk call returns at most one row per constituent of the index or universe (several per constituent for ESMA positions and consensus).
3. Work out the pages. page_size can be set up to your plan's limit: 100 rows on Trader, 1,000 on Quant and 10,000 on Developer. Bulk endpoints default to 1,000 rows a page, and other endpoints to 100.
4. Add up the pages: each page costs its base cost plus its rows × the per-row cost, with the row part capped at 500 (1,500 on bulk). A page that comes back empty costs 0.05.

Fewer, larger pages are cheaper on single-stock endpoints, because the base cost is charged per page. On bulk endpoints the page size makes no difference.

Worked examples

For a long history the per-row price is the same either way, so the totals are close; fetching by stock needs fewer requests (one per stock rather than one per date).

Selecting many stocks

• index= takes an ORTEX index identifier, for example US500, US1000, US2000, US3000, US100, US30, UK100, DE40, JP225, EU600, STOXX600 or WORLD (the bulk endpoints' reference lists them). An index's constituents are taken as of the requested date.
• universe= takes the name of one of your own universes, built with the Universe APIs (/api/v11/universes/). On Quant a universe holds at most 250 stocks; on Developer it is unlimited.
• Bulk and universe endpoints need a Quant or Developer plan.

What is charged

A call that finds nothing costs 0.05, so polling an endpoint for data that has not been published yet costs 0.05 per attempt.

Your balance

• Balance: meta.credits.remaining on every charged response is your balance after that page.
• When credits renew: credits are granted for your subscription cycle and expire at its end; top-ups carry their own expiry, and the credits that expire soonest are used first.
• Running out: when your balance is used up, a charged request returns 402 creditsExhausted. Its error.context gives your plan, allowance, credits used and remaining, when the cycle ends and whether it renews (see Response & Error Codes). A request is served while your balance is above zero: if it costs more than the credits left, it is still served and your balance goes to zero, never below. The next charged request is refused.
• Simultaneous requests are charged one at a time against your balance, so they cannot overdraw it.
• Automatic top-ups happen only if you turn on auto-refill in your API billing settings. When it is on, a top-up is bought when your balance falls to your chosen threshold, up to the monthly spending limit you set. Without it, nothing is bought automatically.