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Tell HN: Yahoo Finance has apparently killed its API

235 points by php2011 ↗ HN
Yahoo Finance has apparently killed is API. Zero warning. Lots of apps probably use this.

Before, you could get stock information by using http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv

Now, you get the following message: It has come to our attention that this service is being used in violation of the Yahoo Terms of Service. As such, the service is being discontinued. For all future markets and equities data research, please refer to finance.yahoo.com.

What violation of TOS? People have been using this for years without any issues.

If you are going to cut this off, how about a warning and heads up?

Guess that's what we should expect from OATH / Verizon.

103 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread
jklein11
If you built a business around data that you didn't explicitly have the rights to you built that house of cards yourself.
yeukhon
You realized that’s probably half of the startups and companies out there right?
ploika
That doesn't make it any less true.
AznHisoka
Businesses can fail. That is true as well.

I guess we should never build businesses.

ploika
That's a bit reductionist.

I'm saying we should enter into formal contracts for services that are vital to the running of our businesses. That way there's more protection against getting the rug pulled out from underneath us.

rdlecler1
Thanks to the MVP religion the expectation is now set that for any business should be able to get $2m in revenue with a $5,000 investment from your uncles and cousins. More often than not you’re taking these risks because you don’t have the money or infrastructure to ‘do it propperly’.
AznHisoka
That's easier said than done. Try getting a meeting with the VP of Facebook, who's bonus depends on increasing ad revenue for Fortune 500's with a $100 million dollar budget. Or plow through and take the risk, and be the next Buffer.
TallGuyShort
The risks you take in your business should be calculated risks. 100% of your business on data you haven't somehow ensured access to? Bad calculation if you ask me.
beejiu
Most startups and companies (try to) act in good faith and will acquire a license. And, if they did not, they should foresee the legal and operational consequences.
_jdams
Well YouTube was similar when it first started, no? People were uploading whatever they wanted, and eventually they rolled out DMCA takedown and reporting features for copyright infringement violations.

Over time, the service was setup with a full feature set to handle all of this, but it didn't exist when YouTube first started.

fluxCapicator
I mean just because YouTube broke the rules and made it doesn’t mean everyone else will.

If you believe that, then... Wanna buy a lottery ticket from me?

fluxCapicator
That data is expensive. Do things the right way, or why not outsource your programmers to India while you’re at it then?
jklein11
Sometimes a house of cards is exactly what you need to prove that it is a good idea. Then you can look for weaknesses and fortify the structure.

You just can't blame the wind when it comes and knocks down the house.

Also, I think half of startups and companies is a little bit high. I can't imagine that the majority of large companies are cool with this kind of risk.

amelius
That sounds like Google Books.
sangnoir
Not according to the courts.
Crontab
Reminds me of all the Twitter API issues that clients face.
neximo64
> What violation of TOS?

It is against Yahoo's TOS to scrape the data there. So yes its darn entitled to even expect a heads up.

stedaniels
You don't "scrape" a .csv.

It is what it is.

chris_wot
Downloading a csv isn’t scraping.
cm2187
I don't know if the csv was meant to be an api or just giving the option to someone visiting yahoo finance (and therefore viewing ads) the ability to download data they viewed. If you go straight to the data and bypass the ads, you are sort of scraping.
chris_wot
You must be joking. It’s an API, ads are irrelevant.
jonknee
Well the geniuses at Yahoo also broke their own site--if you go to Yahoo Finance and try use their own download link it takes you to the same message. So they must not actually care about the ads.
jsemrau
Roughly 10 years ago I build an Excel stock screener using this API. The data quality was always terrible.
dx034
I wouldn't trade on it but they were reasonably good to get a sense for where stuff trades. E.g. monitoring your portfolio with this worked well, esp for EOD data.
cwyers
There's a thread about this on Yahoo!s own forums:

https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Yahoo-Finance-help/http-download...

I am incredibly amused by the person who refers to himself as a customer of this. If you want to be treated like a customer, find someone who will charge you money in exchange for the service provided.

jonwinstanley
There's obviously way more nuance to this though. APIs of this nature rarely charge a fee.
cm2187
You mean APIs that provide market data? Quite the opposite.
wolco
Sorry in this day and age using a product makes you a customer and the product. Facebook, Google considers you one.
hbcondo714
The last post on another Yahoo! forum[1] is from an admin that says:

The new download issue which began 11/01/17 and returning an error 999 for most users is currently being investigated and we hope to have it resolved soon

This was before the TOS violation response was being returned so I'm assuming not everyone in Yahoo! was prepared to deal with this.

[1] https://forums.yahoo.net/t5/Yahoo-Finance-help/Is-Yahoo-Fina...

peterbraden
The undocumented Google finance API was also turned off this month after many years.

There's a severe dearth of good, free, market data API's.

dx034
If both shut down within a short period of time it's probably due to the vendor. I'd guess one of the major exchanges in the US has changed the terms of the license or started enforcing it. They make money with this data so it's understandable that they don't like free APIs.
jmalicki
Likely the NYSE, they've decided to make some money off of algorithmic trading by charging a non-display fee, where it costs thousands of dollars per month to use stock quotes for anything other than displaying to a human, and have been on a warpath enforcing it, causing a large fight between the NYSE and Bloomberg, Citadel, etc. with lots of lawyers and government regulators involved.

I can't imagine they're happy about people possibly using Google or Yahoo Finance APIs for similar purposes either (since most of the uses of market data APIs are probably for non-display use).

http://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-letter-targets-nyse...

https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/data/Policy-NonDisplay_...

joshmn
For us non-financy-types, does anyone mind letting us know what this file looked like so we can, you know, potentially duplicate it and provide it to those who find it a necessity?
csallen
I interviewed the people behind Intrinio[1] for Indie Hackers. I haven't used their product myself, so I can't tell you how it stacks up against the Yahoo and Google APIs that were killed this month. But I do know that they provide financial data and APIs to developers, and their primary goal is making it super cheap and pleasant to use.

[1] https://intrinio.com

mef
They broke functionality on their own pages, yikes.

E.g. the export button on the desktop version of https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/MMM,IBM/view/v1?ql=1

m0skit0
Recursive Yahoo TOS violation
sova
Terms of Service violate the Terms of Service ...
cube00
You'd think after you take down an API you've be furiously checking the server logs for any referrers coming from inside the house.
JulianMorrison
Half dead company running on fumes. They probably don't even know half of what they run, let alone have staff to check the logs.
beaupritchard
"Half dead company running on fumes"

And for good reason. I don't go to yahoo for its clever articles or its mail or its search function ... I go to download currency commodity and stock information.

At least they could have explored offering the million people like me the info for a couple of bucks a month ... 2 million a month is worth looking at.

Instead a cryptic adios ... its brand suicide (or murder seeing how verizon owns them now)

draw_down
Yeah, if someone gives a shit. I would say that has not described Yahoo for some time now.
mattpk
There are lots of talented Yahoo employees who read HN, and cringe at what teams on the other side of campus are doing.
macroexchange
edit - hackernews apparently doesn't value new ideas.
dmitrygr
Please forgive my ignorance, but what possible intersection is there between blockchains (method of immutably storing small quantities of data in a distributed fashion currently limited by power waste, slowness, and needed storage amount) and providing real data about real stock markets to real people (getting data with proper license and providing it to others on request, currently limited by legal means)?
the_duke
Coin exchanges are dealing with plenty of real money for plenty of real people and have real licenses and very real government oversight (at least in places like the US and EU) , so your snark is not very appropriate.

Regarding your actual point, I can't see the connection either.

TallGuyShort
If people not liking an idea means they don't like all ideas, how do you identify your bad ideas?
pstadler
Quite happy about the suggestions for similar APIs here. They’re somehow hard to find in the forest of overpriced professional services.

I‘m using a different Yahoo endpoint with ticker.sh[1], which is still functioning at this time. Maybe there‘s soon the need to find yet another alternative after the Google endpoint stopped working recently.

[1] https://github.com/pstadler/ticker.sh

payne92
IEX has an official, documented, supported, relatively clean, and entirely free API for their market data:

https://iextrading.com/developer/docs/

It's just US stocks, and quote data is just for their exchange (and you can get the deep book if you're interested in that stuff). But they have basic company info: earnings estimates, split info, dividend info, etc. as well.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
indescions_2017
Yes, IEX only. But still great service, great tools. All for free. I mean how often do you see websocket support?

If you want or need high res quotes from all exchanges including options data, you can also take a look at Nanex

http://www.nanex.net/

And thanks to everyone for posting great links ;)

goodfight
What is the pricing like?
lai
It is free (IEX).
iex_ux
IEX here. Thanks for mentioning our API. We are excited to see what everyone will build. Just to reiterate, the API is free for personal and commercial use, doesn't require an API key, and is reliable enough to drive our own applications.

Real time quotes and trades are available from our own market data, but we also provide market wide prices (SIP) on 15 minute delay in addition to the company info mentioned above.

We are very actively developing the API, and will continue to improve data sets, features, and performance. If you experience any issues we have community support at https://github.com/iexg/IEX-API/issues which we actively monitor.

wsxiaoys
Thanks for building this! I noticed that the charting api have EOD prices for past 5 years, is there a plan to support longer durations?
iex_ux
We are currently working on new datasets including EOD data for the past 20 years. Our market data is available now through REST and WebSockets, but we are working on adding more data via WebSocket, and introducing HTTP streaming in the near future.
olalonde
Zero warnings? Didn't Yahoo die like a few years ago?
adventured
Globally about a billion people annually use at least one Yahoo service.

The answer to your question is: nope.

COil
After 22 years they still can't handle a mailbox correctly, so that's not very astonishing.
csandstedt
At TagniFi we have a free account that provides access to end-of-day market data (TagniFi Markets) via our API at no cost. Data items include high, low, open, close and volume along with adjusted closing price (for splits and dividends). Documentation is at http://docs.tagnifi.com/article/63-search-tagnifi-markets. Sign up at https://www.tagnifi.com/trial

Note: we only limit our trial to the Dow 30 for our fundamental data (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement). Market data is not restricted to the Dow 30 for the trial which does not expire.

pselbert
A non profit that I support has been relying on Yahoo for exchange rate information for nearly 10 years. I knew when I inherited the app that this was imminent, so it wasn’t too surprising.

There are plenty of alternative paid APIs out there that made switching easy. Hopefully others who had legacy developers integrate with the financial APIs are able to switch easily too.

runeks
Was there ever a TOS for this API? I was under the impression that this was just an internal API used by Yahoo Finance itself, and that they've never marketed it in any way.
vizzah
Yeah. It's been on & off for a while but yesterday looks like it went for good.

I had to fix my script switching to:

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/api/quote-page/{CURRENCY_PA...

stzup7
is it documented somewhere or you just analyzed your browser requests?
nevi-me
You'll get IP banned if you go beyond a certain threshold, but looks like you can find other API endpoints by looking at browser requests.
binarymax
I did notice that in DDG, "!finance TICKER" now goes to other sites, where recently it used to go to yahoo finance. I wonder if the change was due to this, and if DDG had any warning?
rocannon
I use Alpha Vantage, just for a personal (1 user, me) application. The service is free, you just need an API key. - https://www.alphavantage.co/

https://www.alphavantage.co/support/#api-key "While we are proud to provide free API service with no daily/weekly/monthly call limits, we recommend that API call frequency does not extend far beyond ~100 calls per minute so that we can continue to deliver the optimal server-side performance. If you would like to target a much larger API call volume, please drop us a note..."

cdubzzz
Implementing this to replace a very low usage exchange rate form. The format of their data is... odd. E.g. -

{ "Realtime Currency Exchange Rate": { "1. From_Currency Code": "BND", "2. From_Currency Name": "Brunei Dollar", "3. To_Currency Code": "USD", "4. To_Currency Name": "United States Dollar", "5. Exchange Rate": "0.73326846", "6. Last Refreshed": "2017-11-03 17:37:12", "7. Time Zone": "UTC" } }

Why the numbers and mix of underscores and spaces in keys?

rocannon
I don't know why they did that, you would need to ask them. They seem to be open to questions and suggestions. My guess is that it's historical and now it would annoy too many users to change.
testb
I remember seeing this API from another post.... Any idea who's behind it?