Metals API for live and historical metal prices

Gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper and five more base metals as JSON: live spot prices, daily history back to 1966, and the exchange data most metals APIs don't carry. Start free with 200 requests a month, no card required.

Every metal in one request, with bid, ask and 24-hour change
Daily history back to 1966, intraday down to 15 minutes
COMEX inventory, LBMA vaults, Shanghai premiums and CFTC positioning
Commercial use on every plan, documented with OpenAPI 3.0

Get a free key See pricing Read the docs

GET https://api.metalcharts.org/v1/prices200 OK

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "XAU": {
      "symbol": "XAU",
      "price": 4286.23637,
      "bid": 4271.2345427049995,
      "ask": 4301.238197295,
      "change24h": -0.50336,
      "changePercent24h": -0.0117,
      "high24h": 4286.4489,
      "low24h": 4284.85731,
      "timestamp": "2026-09-26T18:12:50.484Z",
      "exchange": "SPOT",
      "marketType": "spot",
      "stale": false
    }
  }
}

Recorded from /v1/prices on September 26, 2026 and trimmed to the gold entry. Bid and ask are indicative, a fixed spread around the mid price.

1966

Gold and silver daily history starts

Metals with live spot prices

1,100+

Instruments in the catalogue

200

Free requests a month, no card

At a glance

The MetalCharts API in twelve facts

What you need to decide whether it fits, before reading any docs.

Base URL: https://api.metalcharts.org
Authentication: Bearer token in the header: Authorization: Bearer mc_live_YOUR_KEY
Format: REST over HTTPS, GET requests, JSON responses
Specification: OpenAPI 3.0 (JSON)
Free tier: 200 requests a month, 10 a minute, one key, no card. Public displays need a credit link.
Prices: Free $0, Starter $9/month, Basic $29/month, Pro $99/month, Ultimate $249/month. Paying yearly costs ten months.
Rate limits: Weight per minute on each key, plus a monthly allowance per account on Free, Starter and Basic
Live prices: Ten metals with 24-hour change, high, low and an indicative bid and ask; responses cached 30 seconds
History: Daily bars back to October 1966 for gold and silver, intraday from 15 minutes, up to 5,000 candles a request; from Starter
Exchange data: COMEX, LBMA, Shanghai, India MCX and CFTC from Pro; Guangzhou (GFEX) on Ultimate
Commercial use: Allowed on every plan, Free included
Support: [email protected]

Plans and limits

Exactly what each plan allows

Two limits, both counted in weight: a per-minute limit on each API key, and a monthly allowance per account on the three smaller plans. Pro and Ultimate have no monthly cap.

Compare all plans

Rate limits, monthly allowances, API keys and history depth for each MetalCharts API plan
Plan	Per minuteweight, per API key	Per monthweight, all keys combined	API keys	History
Free$0	10	200200 spot calls	1	Live spot only
Starter$9/mo	20	10,00010,000 spot calls or 5,000 history calls	2	1 year
Basic$29/mo	30	250,000250,000 spot calls or 125,000 history calls	3	1 year
Pro$99/mo	200	No monthly cap	10	5 years
Ultimate$249/mo	1,000	No monthly cap	25	Full, back to 1966

01
What a request costs
Every call costs weight. Spot prices, market status, instruments and most other endpoints cost 1. History and news cost 2. News search and sentiment cost 3. Checking your own usage at /v1/usage costs 0. Both limits are counted in weight, so a 10,000 allowance is 10,000 spot calls or 5,000 history calls.
02
The per-minute limit is per key
Each API key has its own per-minute limit, counted in fixed one-minute windows that reset at the start of every minute (UTC). Go over it and that key gets a 429 with a Retry-After header giving the seconds until the next minute. Your other keys are unaffected.
03
The monthly allowance is per account
On plans that have one, the monthly allowance is shared by all of your keys and counted per calendar month in UTC. It resets at 00:00 UTC on the 1st. Go over it and every request returns a 429 saying the monthly quota is exceeded, until the reset or until you upgrade.
04
What counts and what doesn't
Every request with a valid key for data your plan includes counts toward both limits, including requests refused with a 429. A request with a missing or invalid key (401), or for data your plan doesn't include (403), counts toward neither.
05
No surprise bills
Going over a limit never charges you and never upgrades your plan. You upgrade or downgrade yourself from the API console, and the new limits apply to your keys within 20 seconds.
06
Every response tells you where you stand
Responses carry X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Used and X-RateLimit-Reset for the current minute. On plans with a monthly allowance they also carry X-RateLimit-Month-Limit, X-RateLimit-Month-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Month-Used and X-RateLimit-Month-Reset.

Quickstart

Call it from any language

There's no SDK to install. Replace mc_live_YOUR_KEY with a key from the API console and run any of these.

Gold price API in cURL

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer mc_live_YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.metalcharts.org/v1/prices"

Every tracked metal comes back in one response; gold is under data.XAU.

Gold price API in Python

import requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://api.metalcharts.org/v1/prices",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer mc_live_YOUR_KEY"},
    timeout=10,
)
res.raise_for_status()

price = res.json()["data"]["XAU"]["price"]
print(f"Gold: ${price}")

Uses requests. raise_for_status turns a 401 or 429 into an exception rather than letting a bad payload through.

Gold price API in JavaScript

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.metalcharts.org/v1/prices",
  { headers: { Authorization: "Bearer mc_live_YOUR_KEY" } },
);

if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`HTTP ${res.status}`);

const { data } = await res.json();
console.log(`Gold: ${data.XAU.price}`);

Native fetch, so it runs in Node 18 and above. Keep the key on your server; proxy browser requests through it.

Gold price API in PHP

<?php
$ch = curl_init("https://api.metalcharts.org/v1/prices");
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => ["Authorization: Bearer mc_live_YOUR_KEY"],
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 10,
]);

$body = curl_exec($ch);
$code = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);

if ($code !== 200) {
    throw new RuntimeException("MetalCharts API returned $code");
}

$data = json_decode($body, true);
echo "Gold: " . $data["data"]["XAU"]["price"];

Plain cURL with no dependencies. Check the status code, because a failed call still returns a parseable body.

Gold price API in Go

req, _ := http.NewRequest(
    http.MethodGet, "https://api.metalcharts.org/v1/prices", nil,
)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer mc_live_YOUR_KEY")

resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
if err != nil {
    return err
}
defer resp.Body.Close()

var out struct {
    Data map[string]struct {
        Price float64 `json:"price"`
    } `json:"data"`
}
if err := json.NewDecoder(resp.Body).Decode(&out); err != nil {
    return err
}
fmt.Println("Gold:", out.Data["XAU"].Price)

Decoding into a narrow struct keeps the compiler honest about the field you actually use.

Coverage

History depth you can check

These are the counts the history endpoint returns. Each metal has its own page with worked examples.

Metal	Symbol	Daily bars	Back to
Gold Price API	XAU	14,425	October 1966
Silver Price API	XAG	14,488	October 1966
Platinum Price API	XPT	5,798	January 2005
Palladium Price API	XPD	5,799	January 2005
Copper Price API	HG	9,776	July 1988

Aluminium, nickel, zinc, lead and tin are covered too, alongside crypto, ETFs, indices, energy and agricultural commodities and foreign exchange. /v1/instruments lists all 1,100 plus, free on every plan.

Beyond spot

Exchange data most metals APIs don't carry

Anyone can resell a spot price. The reason to use this API is what sits behind it: COMEX, LBMA, Shanghai, India and CFTC data from Pro, and Guangzhou on Ultimate.

COMEX

Registered and eligible warehouse stocks, volume and open interest, and daily delivery notices by firm with month and year to date totals.

LBMA

London vault holdings and clearing statistics, the monthly series the market actually watches.

Shanghai

SGE benchmark fixings, vault inventory and contract trading, plus SHFE settlement prices and warehouse stocks.

India

MCX futures and the Indian premium over Western pricing.

Guangzhou

Registered warehouse receipts for lithium carbonate, industrial silicon and polysilicon, per warehouse, published only in Chinese at source.

CFTC

Commitments of Traders positioning by category, weekly.

Built to integrate

What working with it is like

One call, every metal

/v1/prices returns every tracked metal with 24-hour change, high, low and an indicative bid and ask. A dashboard showing five metals makes one request.

Commercial use on every plan

Free included, with no separate licence and no cap on your end users. Free-plan data shown publicly needs a visible credit link to MetalCharts. Reselling access to the API or republishing the raw data as a competing feed isn't allowed.

Stale data says so

Where a series can go quiet, responses carry asOf and a stale flag instead of a bare array, so you find out from the response and not from a customer.

One symbol catalogue

/v1/instruments lists 1,100 plus instruments and which routes accept each one, free on every plan. Gold is XAU on history but GOLD on the 24/7 markets endpoint.

Limits you can see

Every response carries X-RateLimit headers for the minute and, on capped plans, the month, so you meter yourself instead of discovering a limit by being refused.

No SDK to install

Plain HTTPS returning JSON, with a bearer token. Whatever HTTP client you already use will do, and the OpenAPI 3.0 spec generates a typed client if you want one.

FAQ

Common questions

Is there a free metals price API?

Yes. The free tier gives live spot prices for every metal we track, plus currency conversion and market status, with one key and 200 weight a month. No card is needed. Most competitors put a comparable free tier behind a 100-request monthly quota, so this is several times larger and covers far more metals.

Can I use the API commercially?

Yes, on every plan including Free. You can build a product on the data, sell that product, and serve your own customers with a single key. There is no separate commercial licence and no cap on end users. On Free, public displays need a visible link to metalcharts.org. The one thing not permitted on any plan is reselling access to the API itself or republishing the raw data as a competing feed.

What metals does the API cover?

Gold, silver, platinum, palladium and copper as the core, plus aluminium, nickel, zinc, lead and tin. Beyond metals there is crypto, ETFs, indices, energy and agricultural commodities, and foreign exchange.

How is the API rate limited?

By weight per minute, plus a monthly allowance on the smaller plans. Most endpoints cost 1 weight, historical data costs 2, and news search costs 3. Free allows 200 weight a month, Starter 10,000 and Basic 250,000; Pro and Ultimate have no monthly ceiling. Every response carries X-RateLimit headers so you can meter yourself instead of discovering a limit by being refused.

What is the best metals price API?

It depends on whether you need a price or a picture of the market. For a gold or silver price on a page, pick on cost and uptime: MetalCharts gives 200 requests a month free and 10,000 on Starter for $9 a month. For anything that explains or trades metals you need exchange data, meaning COMEX inventory and deliveries, LBMA vaults, Shanghai and Indian premiums and CFTC positioning. MetalCharts carries all of them from Pro, and few metals APIs carry any.

What makes this different from other metals APIs?

Exchange data that generally is not resold: COMEX warehouse stocks and delivery notices, LBMA vault holdings, Shanghai and Indian premiums, CFTC positioning, and Guangzhou warehouse receipts for lithium carbonate, industrial silicon and polysilicon that are published only in Chinese.

Do you offer historical data downloads?

History comes through the same API rather than as bulk files. /v1/history returns up to 5,000 candles per request across daily, weekly, monthly and seven intraday intervals. If annual figures are enough, the free data page has CSV downloads of annual average gold and silver prices back to 1970. Free metals price data

Guides

Per-metal guides and reference

Start with 200 requests a month, free

No card and no trial clock. When you need history or more volume, Starter is $9 a month.

Get a free key Compare plans