Why I Switched After Alpha Vantage Rate Limits Hit
Alpha Vantage's 25 requests per day free tier sounds reasonable until you're running a portfolio rebalancer that checks 15 tickers every morning. That's your quota gone before 9:30 AM.
yfinance doesn't have official rate limits. Yahoo Finance's unofficial API tolerates hundreds of requests per hour as long as you're not hammering their servers. For most retail quant projects, that's the difference between a working backtest and three days of waiting for API quotas to reset.
But the migration isn't just swapping av.get_daily() for yf.download(). The data formats differ in subtle ways that'll break your position sizing if you're not careful. yfinance vs Alpha Vantage vs Polygon: Real Cost Per 1M Calls covers the cost side — this post shows what actually breaks in your code.
The Alpha Vantage Setup That Worked
Here's the portfolio code I was running with Alpha Vantage. Nothing fancy, just a momentum-based rebalancer:
python
from alpha_vantage.timeseries import TimeSeries
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*Continue reading the full article on [TildAlice](https://tildalice.io/alpha-vantage-yfinance-migration-breaking-changes/)*
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