Data providers & freshness

4 min read · updated 2026-06-27

Every market-data need sits behind a fallback chain of free sources: if the first provider fails or starts turning requests away (free sources cap how often you can ask), the next steps in. No paid vendor, no surprise data bill, and no one outage can take the whole feed down:

DataChain
Daily bars (each day’s price history)Tiingo → Alpaca IEX
QuotesYour Alpaca → Finnhub → Tiingo IEX
Crypto quotes (a coin’s current price)Your Alpaca → CoinGecko → Binance public
Crypto price history (each day’s prices per coin)Your Alpaca → CoinGecko
Company financials (fundamentals)Finnhub
SEC filings (8-K event reports, Form 4 insider trades)SEC EDGAR
Earnings dates (upcoming report dates)Finnhub

Freshness

Screens that depend on external data show a freshness indicator, and when a whole chain is struggling, a stale banner showing when data last came through successfully. SleeveFolio prefers loudly stale over quietly wrong. See Stale data & provider outages.

No data bill

Because every source is free, there’s no per-user data charge and no paid data tier. Free sources do ration requests, so SleeveFolio keeps its own usage modest behind the scenes (one signal run or backtest per account at a time, plus a short cooldown between manual runs) rather than billing you per lookup. Market data that is the same for everyone (a day’s closing prices, a company’s financials, the upcoming-earnings calendar) is fetched once, then stored and reused across every account, so the same lookup isn’t repeated person by person. That keeps the free sources well within their limits, leaves recent values on hand even if a source has a brief wobble, and means adding more members doesn’t multiply how often we ask the providers. Your plan’s real limits (universe size) show on the Usage vs plan card.