The LSE Directory / Data providers
Currencylayer is a REST/JSON API product that delivers real-time and historical foreign exchange rates for 168 world currencies, along with precious metals (gold, XAU, and silver, XAG). Historical data is available back to 1999. The API's core endpoints cover live rates, historical lookups, currency conversion, time-frame queries and change (delta) queries, and rate data is sourced from multiple commercial forex data vendors, blended algorithmically, validated, and delivered on a schedule that ranges from daily updates on the free tier to 60-second updates on the top paid tier. Currencylayer targets developers and businesses that need to embed FX rates into currency converters, mobile apps, e-commerce checkout flows, billing systems and back-office finance tooling. Its positioning in the FX-data-API category is price and simplicity: a single flat-JSON endpoint with tiered, self-serve pricing (a free plan at 100 calls, then paid tiers starting around 15 USD per month), rather than the enterprise sales-led, per-seat pricing common among institutional FX data vendors. It is one of several data APIs published under the APILayer umbrella, sitting alongside Fixer (also currency rates), marketstack (equities), weatherstack, and others, so customers can consume multiple data verticals through a common account and billing relationship. Currencylayer is a product of apilayer, a Vienna, Austria based company founded in 2015 by brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr (Paul served as CEO and co-founder). Apilayer was acquired by Idera, Inc. on January 18, 2021, joining Idera's Developer Tools business unit alongside Embarcadero, LANSA, Sencha, Whole Tomato, Froala and FusionCharts; at the time of acquisition apilayer reported serving more than 500,000 customers, including Amazon, Apple, Slack, Airbnb, Uber, Facebook and Zendesk. Currencylayer's own marketing separately cites Disney, Lyft and TeamViewer among its users. As of its current pricing page, Currencylayer offers five tiers: a free plan (100 requests per month, daily updates), Basic at 14.99 USD per month (10,000 requests, hourly updates), Enterprise at 59.99 USD per month (100,000 requests, 10-minute updates), Enterprise+ at 99.99 USD per month (500,000 requests, 60-second updates), and a custom volume tier with 60-second updates and negotiated pricing; annual billing carries a discount of up to 15 percent.
