The Problem No One Talks About
Most yfinance alternatives fail silently during market hours.
I tested seven free stock data APIs by hitting them every 5 seconds during the first 30 minutes of market open. yfinance handled 360 consecutive requests. Alpha Vantage rate-limited me at request 5. Twelve Labs Financial Data API returned cached data with a 47-minute lag. Polygon's free tier gave me real-time quotes for exactly 14 seconds before switching to 15-minute delayed data without warning.
The migration cost isn't just switching import yfinance to import something_else. It's rewriting error handlers, adjusting polling intervals, and discovering your backtest data has survivorship bias baked into the API response format.
This isn't a feature comparison from documentation. These are the numbers I got from actually running the code.
What I Tested
Seven APIs, all with documented "free tiers":
- yfinance (Yahoo Finance unofficial scraper)
- Alpha Vantage (5 requests/minute, 100/day)
- Twelve Data (800 requests/day)
Continue reading the full article on TildAlice
Top comments (0)