Cheapest Exchange Rate API 2026: Real Monthly Cost Compared

Short answer: the cheapest exchange rate API is the cheapest plan that covers how often you refresh, not the one with the lowest price per call. Daily rates cost nothing. Rates every 5 or 10 minutes cost €4.99 to €9.99 a month with AllRatesToday. A true 60-second feed around the clock is cheapest on CurrencyAPI Medium at $39.99. The tables below price every paid plan from ten providers, as listed on their own pricing pages on 24 October 2026.

Why price per call is the wrong number

Most integrations call the API from a server, cache the result, and refresh on a timer. Every visitor then reads the cached rates, so the number of calls depends on the timer, not on your traffic. A latest-rates call also returns every currency for its base, so converting into 5 or 150 currencies costs the same.

Refreshing every 60 seconds from a feed that updates hourly just buys 59 identical answers an hour. So the fair comparison is: for each refresh interval, which plan covers the calls and updates at least that often?

Cheapest plan for each refresh interval

Reading the table:

• Every 5 or 10 minutes is where most price displays, checkouts and dashboards land, and where the gap is widest: €4.99 to €9.99 with AllRatesToday against $30 to $99.99 elsewhere. Every AllRatesToday plan updates every 60 seconds, so the plan size only sets how often you can afford to refresh.
• Every 60 seconds, around the clock needs about 43,200 calls. CurrencyAPI Medium (600,000 calls, 60-second updates, $39.99) is the cheapest plan that does it. AllRatesToday Large (100,000 calls, €49.99) is next.
• Hourly is cheap everywhere. Open Exchange Rates' free plan covers it if a USD base is enough; check its licence for commercial use. For paid hourly plans, CurrencyAPI and CurrencyFreaks are $9.99 and ExchangeRate-API $10.
• Daily should cost nothing. Frankfurter and AllRatesToday's /api/open/latest/USD both serve ECB reference rates keyless and may be used in commercial products (AllRatesToday asks for a visible attribution link). Several other free tiers forbid commercial use, which is why Fixer and its siblings show $14.99.

Every paid plan, priced per 1,000 calls

If you do need raw volume, for example to fetch rates on every request without a cache, this is what each plan costs per 1,000 included calls.

Fixer, currencylayer and ExchangeRatesAPI.io are all apilayer products with the same price ladder and the same overage charges (about $6 per 1,000 extra calls on Basic). XE prices are yearly; the per-1,000 figure divides the yearly price by twelve.

Cost traps to check before you pay

• Base currency. Open Exchange Rates and CurrencyFreaks lock the free plan to a USD base, and apilayer's free plans to one base too. Converting from another base then needs extra maths or a paid plan.
• Commercial use. A free tier that bans commercial use is not free for a business. That applies to Fixer, currencylayer, ExchangeRatesAPI.io, CurrencyAPI and AllRatesToday's free key.
• Overages. apilayer bills each call over the allowance. ExchangeRate-API says it will contact you before cutting you off. Know which one you are buying.
• History. Fetching a time series can count as many calls, or need a higher tier. AllRatesToday bills history as one call per currency per month of data on paid plans.
• The kind of rate. Invoices, VAT and customs usually need a named central bank's published rate, not a market rate. For that, see the central bank exchange rate API ranking.

Try it before choosing a plan

No key, no account: the latest ECB rates for any base, the same data a daily integration would use.

curl "https://allratestoday.com/api/open/latest/USD"

Live market rates updated every 60 seconds need a free key; this call returns several currencies and counts as one request:

curl "https://allratestoday.com/api/v1/rates?source=USD&target=EUR,GBP,JPY" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

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