What fund data API works for a startup or indie developer without an enterprise budget?

Why enterprise fund data does not fit a small team

The established fund databases are sold as annual licences with per-user or per-application pricing, redistribution schedules and a procurement process. That is right for a bank and wrong for a two-person product that needs the TER and holdings of 300 ETFs.

What a small team gets

• Self-serve: key in a minute, cancel from the dashboard.
• Complete payload on every plan: nothing is gated by field; plans differ by volume and features.
• Commercial licence from $49 for displaying and processing the data in your product.
• Developer surface: SDKs, OpenAPI, MCP server, AGENTS.md, React widgets, so one person can integrate it in an afternoon.
• Provenance: figures from the fund houses' own documents with dataAsOf, which is what your users and any compliance reviewer will ask about.

Sizing the plan

Requests scale with distinct ISINs per day, not with users, because you cache each payload until expiresAt.

python
# pip install fundfacts
from fundfacts import FundFacts
ff = FundFacts()  # FUNDFACTS_API_KEY
fund = ff.get_fund("IE00B4L5Y983")
print(fund["name"], fund["data"]["headlineMetrics"]["ter"], fund["data"]["dataAsOf"])

When you outgrow it

Enterprise is metered at $0.01 per request on invoice with a DPA, an SLA and a named contact. If you then need ratings or a terminal, add a vendor; the API keeps doing the factsheet layer.