Market Data API Commercial Use: Can You Show the Data to Your Own Users?
What commercial use means on a stock market data API, the difference between showing data to your users and redistributing it, what the major vendors' terms allow as read on October 28, 2026, how a self-serve data license covers an app, a newsletter or an AI research product, and where the line sits on the ordinary Pro plan.
A market data API plan is a license, and the license decides where the numbers may appear. Most plans let you pull data into your own scripts, dashboards and models. Fewer let you put those numbers in front of other people: a subscriber's screen, a client's report, an answer your AI assistant writes for a user. That second use is what "commercial use" usually means when a builder asks about it, and it is the use most pricing pages leave to the terms page or to a sales call.
This post explains what display rights are, what the major vendors' terms say about them as read on October 28, 2026, what a data license for an application should cover, and how the SentiSense Data License handles it. If you are building a fintech app, a research product, a newsletter with live tables or an AI agent that answers investors' questions, this is the page to read before you pick a provider.
What does commercial use mean on a market data API?
Three uses sit behind the phrase, and vendors draw the lines between them differently.
- Internal use. You retrieve the data for yourself or your company: backtests, internal dashboards, a trading model, a research notebook. Nearly every paid plan allows this, and many free keys do too.
- Display use. You present the data to your own users inside your product: a quote on a stock page, an estimates table in a report, a chart, an alert, a score you compute from it, or a sentence an AI assistant in your app writes from it. This is where an app, a newsletter or a research terminal lives.
- Redistribution. You pass the data on as data: an API of your own, a feed, a downloadable file, a dataset, resale or sublicensing. Vendors almost always reserve this for a separate agreement, because it competes with their own product.
The useful question to ask a vendor is not "can I use this commercially" but "may my end users see these values, and in what form." A plan that allows the second use will say so in its terms, name the plan it applies to, and usually say something about caching, attribution and third-party data.
What the major vendors allow, read on October 28, 2026
Every sentence quoted below was read on the vendor's own terms or pricing page on that date, with the link next to it. Terms change, so reread the page before you sign. Items we could not confirm are marked unverified.
| Vendor | What the terms say about showing data to your users | Plan where display is allowed, monthly price | Plain reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial Modeling Prep | The terms of service bar showing FMP data on websites, software products or applications built for use by multiple people without a specific agreement, and the pricing page says display or redistribution needs a Data Display and Licensing Agreement (terms, pricing). | None published. The commercial tab offers an Enterprise contact form for "data display and redistribution". | Starter, Premium and Ultimate ($29 to $139) are personal-use plans. Display needs a separate agreement from sales. |
| EODHD | The terms bar personal-plan users from displaying the data or granting access to it in original or repackaged form, and the commercial pricing FAQ says the internal-use package may not be displayed to people outside your company (terms, commercial pricing). | Not stated. Internal use is $399 and explicitly bars external display; Enterprise is $2,499 and includes a data services agreement but does not mention display; Custom is "from $399" by quote. | Ambiguous above $399. Enterprise and Custom include a data services agreement, but neither says whether it covers display. |
| Massive (formerly Polygon.io) | Plans labeled for individual use may not be used for business purposes. The business terms grant display to the customer's own users within its products and bar delivery as a feed, file or machine-readable output (individual terms, business terms). | Stocks Business, $2,499 (business page). The $0 to $199 plans are labeled individual use. | Display granted in writing from $2,499, display only. |
| Alpha Vantage | The license is for personal, non-commercial use unless agreed in writing, and commercial activity includes letting anyone other than the user access the information (terms). | None published. The premium tiers ($49.99 to $249.99 a month, or $499 to $2,499 a year) say nothing about display; the terms point commercial use to an email address. | Any product other people see needs a written agreement. |
| Finnhub | Every plan listed is for personal use unless stated otherwise, and sharing data or results derived from it needs written approval (terms, pricing). | None published. Free and the $3,500 All-In-One both carry a personal-use license; commercial licenses go through sales. | The restriction reaches derived results, not just raw values. |
| Twelve Data | Business plans may display data to end users in external applications and client-facing products; raw feeds or API redistribution need Enterprise or a license. The terms make external display subject to attribution, exchange rules and separate agreements (terms, business pricing). | Venture, from $149, display only. Enterprise, $1,099, adds redistribution subject to exchange terms. | The cheapest published display right among the price-and-history vendors, though the terms tie external display to an add-on or written agreement. Individual plans ($29 to $999) cannot display externally. |
| Intrinio | Use is internal only unless the plan grants display, resale or other third-party rights under an executed order form; AI outputs visible to end users count as display, and newsletters count as commercial use (terms, pricing). | Startup, "Commercial Use and Display Rights": $333 a month for six months, $666 a month for the next six, then $999, billed quarterly. | Display from $333 rising to $999, scoped by the order form. The $150 individual plan has no display right. |
| Benzinga | Signing up for the free API key binds you to the site terms, which provide the site and its materials "solely for your personal noncommercial use" and bar republishing or distributing any material from it (terms, APIs). | None published. The API pages list no prices; commercial licensing goes through a contact form. | The free key is a personal-use key. Showing the data to anyone else needs an agreement from sales. |
| SentiSense | The Data License grants Display Use in your application, including for products sold to the public and including answers from an AI assistant in your app, with storage of history and ownership of your own analytics; it bars redistribution as data, substitutes for the API and model training, and third-party data (market prices, options data, analyst ratings, price targets and consensus estimates) may be shown in your app, including in analyst-rating and options features, but not in a product or feature whose main purpose is looking that data up, such as a quote page or a ratings lookup (agreement). | Data License: Essentials, $135 with the launch rate to December 31, 2026 ($300 list); Premium, $450 ($1,000 list); 25% less with attribution shown (business pricing). | Display granted in writing, self-serve, from $135. Coverage is the most-watched US stocks, not every listed name. |
What stands out across the table: display rights are rarely on the pricing page itself; they live in a terms document, an "enterprise" line, or an email. The price at which display becomes allowed is often several times the price of the plan a developer starts on, and the moment of discovery is usually after the integration is built.
What a data license for an application should cover
A license you can build a product on answers these questions in writing, before you pay.
- Display, including AI output. The grant should cover records and values, charts and tables, alerts, scores and text derived from the data, and it should say whether an AI assistant or agent feature in your app may answer users with it. Agent features are new enough that many agreements are silent on them.
- Commercial products for a fee. Say it plainly: the license covers products offered to the public for money.
- Your own analytics. You will compute things from the data. The license should say you own those outputs, as long as they do not reproduce the licensed data itself.
- Storage. Can you keep history, including values the API has since revised? A research product needs the number as it stood on the day.
- Attribution. Required, forbidden or optional, and what it costs or saves.
- Third-party data. Some of what a vendor serves comes from upstream providers (exchange prices, consensus estimates, fundamentals) with their own rules. A fair license names those datasets and tells you the limits up front, rather than discovering them at renewal.
- Rate and term. The request rate the license is enforced at, month-to-month or annual, how cancellation works, and who signs: the entity that will be invoiced.
- What you may not do. Redistribution as data, building a substitute for the API, and training models on the data are the usual three. A license that lists them is easier to comply with than one that leaves them to "reasonable use".
Where the line is on the SentiSense Pro plan
The ordinary Pro plan already covers more than most vendors' entry plans. Your own analytics, scores and signals computed from SentiSense data are yours to show anywhere, including in a paid product. Showing the data as delivered (a score, a price target, an estimate or a grade as the API returns it) is fine in a personal project, an internal tool, or a free, unmonetized or invite-only app, as long as the app is not a standalone quote, fundamentals or analyst-data service. What needs the Data License is showing the data as delivered inside a product people pay for, or one funded by ads, sponsorship or affiliate links. That rule is written into the API Terms as of version 1.13, effective December 1, 2026; a paid product that was already live before October 29, 2026 has until January 1, 2027.
How the SentiSense Data License works
The SentiSense Data License is a written agreement you accept at checkout, billed month to month, in two plans. Both include API access at the PRO tier and a request allowance of 2,000 requests per minute. The license adds the permission to show the listed datasets to your users.
Data License: Essentials covers the earnings calendar (report dates, timing, confirmation status and estimates), insider transactions from SEC Form 4 filings with cluster analytics, institutional holdings from SEC 13F filings with holder and flow analytics, and congressional trades from STOCK Act disclosures. Data License: Premium covers all data returned by the public API: company KPIs from filings, earnings analysis, analyst coverage and estimates, sentiment and the SentiSense Score, the SentiSense Rating, options analytics, the market mood index and the rest.
What the license grants, in the agreement's own terms: retrieving the data through the API; Display Use in your application, including for commercial purposes and in products offered to the public for a fee, and including answers from an AI assistant or agent feature of your app; creating your own analytics, scores and signals from it, which you own as long as they do not reproduce the licensed data; and storing it for as long as your application reasonably needs, earlier values included. Attribution is optional, and showing "Powered by SentiSense" with a link next to the data takes 25% off the price.
What it does not grant, stated the same way: redistribution as data (an API, feed, export, dataset or resale), building a substitute for the API, and training or fine-tuning models on the data. One carve-out to know before you design your screens: market prices and other market data, including options, and analyst ratings, price targets and consensus estimates come from third-party providers. You may show them in your product, including in analyst-rating, price-target and options features, but not in a product or feature whose main purpose is looking that data up, such as a stock quote page or an analyst-ratings lookup. Company fundamentals and the earnings calendar, estimates included when they are shown with their report dates, are not third-party data. A report that shows a company's estimates next to its insider activity, sentiment and KPIs is the intended shape; a price-target lookup page is not. If a provider ever requires it, SentiSense may restrict or withdraw specific third-party data on notice and ask you to delete stored copies, and if that materially shrinks your plan's datasets you may cancel on notice for a pro-rated refund of prepaid fees.
Pricing, as of October 28, 2026: Essentials lists at $300 a month and Premium at $1,000. Subscriptions started by December 31, 2026 get 55% off for as long as they stay subscribed, which is $135 and $450 a month, or $101.25 and $337.50 with attribution shown. After that date the launch rate closes to new subscriptions; anyone who started before it keeps it. Month to month, cancel anytime, with a 14-day money-back guarantee on a first paid subscription. The agreement is public at sentisense.ai/agreement/data-license, and the plans are self-serve on the business pricing page.
Coverage is the same as the API's: the most-watched US stocks, about 1,000 names with full curation, end-of-day options data, and sentiment read from news and social sources. If your product needs more than that, or an uptime commitment and custom terms, the enterprise agreement is the path.
A worked example: an AI research product
Take an AI research product: a web app and an MCP server whose agents write reports for paying subscribers, with prices and fundamentals already bought from other providers. What such a product usually lacks is the layer above the statements: company KPIs by segment, earnings summaries that say what changed, and forward estimates with the analyst count behind them, all of which its reports embed as tables inside AI-written text.
Under the license, that is Display Use: the estimates table in a report, the KPI figures the agent cites, the sentiment read on a ticker, and the assistant's own answers to a subscriber's question. A prototype on the ordinary Pro plan runs at 300 requests a minute, which scheduled agents hit quickly; the license raises that ceiling to 2,000 a minute. The data the team already buys elsewhere stays where it is. The license covers what they show from us, next to it.
How to check any vendor in ten minutes
- Find the terms page, not the pricing page, and search it for "redistribut", "display", "end user", "internal" and "derived".
- Note the plan name at which display is allowed and the price. If the answer is "contact sales", put the expected number in your model before you build.
- Read the storage or caching clause. A 24-hour cache limit is common and breaks a history table.
- Read the attribution clause and the third-party data clause.
- Ask in writing, and keep the reply with the order. A license is only as good as the sentence that grants it.
SentiSense provides market information and analytics for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this post is investment advice or legal advice; read any vendor's terms yourself or with counsel before you rely on them.