Understanding API & MCP Pricing Tiers

Free, API Pro, and API Max — Real Rate Limits, Real Coverage, and Exactly Which of the 86 Operations Each Tier Unlocks

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Finmagine API & MCP — free tier to test • Pro/Max for full access • REST + MCP

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Published: July 29, 2026  |  8 min read  |  Developer Guide  |  API & Agent Integration Series

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Master the tier system through a complete learning overview and interactive flashcards

What You Will Master

Every guide in this series eventually says "requires api_pro" or "api_max only." This is the guide those references point back to — the actual limits, the actual company coverage, and the actual code-level gates behind each tier, not marketing copy.

What This Guide Covers:

  1. The Three Tiers at a Glance — Free, API Pro, and API Max, side by side
  2. Free Tier in Depth — the exact 25+25 symbol list, and what it can't do
  3. API Pro in Depth — full universe, all endpoints except one
  4. API Max in Depth — the screener endpoint's exclusive gate, explained
  5. How Tier Gates Actually Work — 429 vs. 403, and the rate-limit headers on every response
  6. The Web-Subscriber Bonus Path — a lesser-known way Premium/Professional website subscribers get API access too
  7. Which Tier Do You Actually Need? — a decision guide by use case

Who This Is For:

  • Developers deciding which tier to subscribe to — know exactly what you're paying for before you pay for it
  • Agent builders — understand what a 403 vs. a 429 response from Finmagine actually means and how to handle each
  • Anyone confused by "api_pro" vs. "professional_web" vs. "premium_web" — this guide untangles the tier naming for good

Test Your Knowledge

Click any card to reveal the answer. Use the search box to find a specific topic.

The Three Tiers at a Glance

Finmagine's REST + MCP API has three tiers. Free requires no signup beyond an account; API Pro and API Max are paid subscriptions billed monthly and cancellable anytime.

TierPriceRequests / DayRequests / HourCompany UniverseScreener Endpoint
Free$0 forever501025 NSE blue chips + 25 S&P 500 mega-caps onlyNo
API Pro$49/mo1,000200Full 5,000+ Indian / 6,400+ US universeNo
API Max$149/mo5,0001,000Full 5,000+ Indian / 6,400+ US universeYes — exclusive
Current pricing is always live on the pricing page. The $ figures above are pulled from the same live configuration this guide's PHP reads at request time — they will always match what you see if you click through to subscribe.

Every tier applies to both REST and MCP access equally — there's no separate "MCP-only" price or gate. One API key, one tier, works identically whether you're calling /api/v1/company/RELIANCE over REST or the equivalent get_company_profile tool over MCP.

TIER 1 OF 3

Free Tier in Depth

Free tier exists to let you try the API — and Claude's MCP integration specifically — with zero commitment. No credit card, no expiry.

Daily Limit
50
Hourly Limit
10
Indian Symbols
25
US Symbols
25

The exact symbol list

Free tier isn't a random 25 — it's Nifty-caliber blue chips on the Indian side and S&P 500 mega-caps on the US side, hardcoded into the auth layer:

// Indian — 25 symbols RELIANCE, TCS, HDFCBANK, ICICIBANK, INFY, HINDUNILVR, ITC, SBIN, BHARTIARTL, KOTAKBANK, BAJFINANCE, LT, AXISBANK, ASIANPAINT, MARUTI, TITAN, SUNPHARMA, NESTLEIND, ULTRACEMCO, WIPRO, HCLTECH, POWERGRID, NTPC, ONGC, TATAMOTORS // US — 25 symbols AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, NVDA, GOOGL, META, TSLA, JPM, V, UNH, AVGO, LLY, XOM, MA, HD, PG, COST, MRK, ABBV, CVX, KO, PEP, ORCL, BAC, JNJ

Calling any profile, ratios, financials, or momentum tool for a symbol outside these two lists returns an error — not a truncated or degraded response. The check happens before any data is fetched.

What Free tier can and can't do

Free tier is genuinely enough to demo an agent end-to-end. Every recipe in agent-recipes.json tagged with a Free-tier-friendly status uses only these 50 symbols and non-screener tools — you can build and test a full working agent chain before ever entering a card number.
TIER 2 OF 3

API Pro in Depth

API Pro removes the company-universe restriction entirely and raises rate limits by 20x over Free — the tier most dashboards, research tools, and single-stock agents actually need.

Daily Limit
1,000
Hourly Limit
200
Indian Universe
5,000+
US Universe
6,400+
This is the tier the MCP research workflows target. The Morning Brief and Single-Stock Deep Dive guides both assume API Pro or above — full universe access is what makes "pick any stock, not just the free 25" actually work.
TIER 3 OF 3

API Max in Depth

API Max includes everything API Pro includes, plus one capability that isn't available at any other tier: the screener.

Daily Limit
5,000
Hourly Limit
1,000
Screener Endpoint
Exclusive

Why the screener is gated separately from everything else

Every other Pro-tier endpoint answers a question about one company you already named. The screener is different — it searches across the entire universe by condition (ROCE, PE, RS rating, D/E, sector, and more, up to 50 results per screen) and is the single most compute-intensive operation the API exposes. Finmagine's auth layer enforces this with a dedicated check, separate from the general Pro-tier gate:

public function requireMaxTier(): void { if (!$this->isMaxTier()) { $this->sendError(403, 'This endpoint requires the api_max tier.'); } }

This is a hard 403 — an API Pro key gets rejected exactly the same way a Free key would. There's no partial or throttled access to the screener at Pro tier; it's Max-only, full stop.

If you're building an agent that needs to discover stocks (not just analyse a named one), you need API Max. Any recipe in agent-recipes.json that starts with a screen step — including the natural-language screener — will fail with a 403 on anything below Max, even with a valid, otherwise-working API Pro key.

How Tier Gates Actually Work in Practice

There are two completely different failure modes an agent needs to distinguish between, and they map to two different HTTP status codes.

StatusWhat it meansWhat to do
429Rate limit reached — you're within your tier's allowed operations but sent too many in the current hour or dayBack off. Daily limits reset at midnight UTC; hourly limits reset on the hour
403Tier gate — the operation itself isn't available at your tier at all, regardless of how many requests you have leftNo amount of waiting fixes this — the key needs to be on a higher tier

Rate-limit headers on every response

Every successful response carries three headers so an agent can self-throttle before hitting a 429 rather than after:

X-RateLimit-Limit-Day: 1000 X-RateLimit-Remaining-Day: 847 X-RateLimit-Remaining-Hour: 163

The same numbers are also mirrored inside the JSON response body itself, under a standard meta block present on every call — useful for agents parsing the body rather than headers:

{ "tier": "api_pro", "requests_remaining_today": 847, "requests_remaining_hour": 163 }
Build agents that check requests_remaining_today before a big batch job. If you're about to fan out 40 calls for a multi-stock screen result, checking this number first avoids burning your last few calls on a job that's guaranteed to 429 partway through.

The Web-Subscriber Bonus Path

Beyond Free / API Pro / API Max, there are two more tier names you may see in response metadata: premium_web and professional_web. These aren't API products you subscribe to directly — they're granted automatically to existing Finmagine website Premium and Professional subscribers as a bonus, so paying for the consumer platform also unlocks a slice of API access without a separate purchase.

TierRequests / DayRequests / HourFull UniversePasses API Pro Gate
premium_web500100YesNo
professional_web2,000400YesYes

Note the asymmetry: professional_web passes every Pro-tier-gated endpoint (it's treated as Pro-or-above internally), while premium_web gets full company-universe access but does not pass Pro-tier-only endpoint gates. Neither web tier unlocks the screener — that remains exclusively api_max.

This is genuinely worth knowing if you already pay for a Finmagine Professional subscription. You may already have working API/MCP access at Pro-tier-equivalent limits under your existing account, without needing a separate API subscription at all — check your key's tier field in any response's meta block to see what you already have.

Which Tier Do You Actually Need?

Your situationTier
Testing an agent integration for the first time, or a demo/proof-of-conceptFree
Building a dashboard, single-stock research tool, or agent that analyses named stocks across the full universeAPI Pro
Building anything that needs to discover stocks by condition — a screener UI, a natural-language "find me stocks where..." agentAPI Max
You already pay for Finmagine Premium or Professional (website subscription)Check your key's tier first — you may already have premium_web or professional_web access

Every recipe in agent-recipes.json declares its required tier explicitly, so you never have to guess — read the recipe's tier field before running it.

What's Next in This Series

With llms.txt covered (discovery) and pricing tiers covered (what you're allowed to call), the next guide closes out Wave 1:

See the API & Agent Integration hub for the full 12-guide roadmap.

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