FXMacroData vs Tradefeeds: Macroeconomic Calendar API Compared

This comparison is for FX traders, quant developers, and small trading teams who found the Tradefeeds Macroeconomic Calendar API while looking for an economic calendar feed and want to know whether it, or FXMacroData, is the better data layer for currency work. Both products sell API access by subscription, but they are built around different jobs: Tradefeeds is a broad financial data bundle with a calendar endpoint inside it, while FXMacroData is a macro data API built specifically for FX workflows.

The core finding: Tradefeeds is a reasonable choice if you want one key for stocks, SEC filings, ETFs, crypto, news, and a basic economic calendar. For release-driven FX work, FXMacroData costs about half as much at entry ($50 versus $99 per month after Tradefeeds' discounted first four weeks*), includes over a hundred times the monthly request allowance for calendar-style calls, stamps every release with a second-level announcement time, and publishes a measured release-speed record. Tradefeeds does not publish country coverage, history depth, or update timing for its calendar on the pages we checked.

Pricing And Plans

Tradefeeds publishes four subscription tiers. Every tier includes the Macroeconomic Calendar API alongside its other bundled APIs. Each tier is billed monthly with a discounted first period for developers to test integration; the Basic checkout states "4 Weeks for $9 then $99 / Month". After that, Basic is $99/month for 9,000 calls at 12 calls/minute, Starter is $149/month for 22,000 calls at 30 calls/minute, Standard is $399/month for 80,000 calls at 100 calls/minute, and Business is $899/month for 180,000 calls at 280 calls/minute*. No free tier or annual pricing was listed.

One detail matters a lot for calendar users. Tradefeeds' API list applies a call count multiplier to some endpoints, and the macroeconomic calendar endpoint carries a multiplier of 5*. Each calendar request therefore counts as five calls, so the Basic plan's 9,000 calls work out to roughly 1,800 calendar requests per month.

FXMacroData publishes its pricing on the pricing page: an Always Free tier with USD data only (no key, 100 requests/day, USD announcements delayed 15 minutes), Individual at $50/month or $500/year with a 14-day trial and 1,000,000 requests/month (bursts of 300/minute and 5,000/hour, 20 concurrent), and Business at $250/month or $2,500/year for companies and teams of up to 10 people with the same allowance and priority support. Enterprise terms are available by custom agreement.

Side-By-Side Comparison

* Competitor pricing retrieved from their public pricing page in October 2026. Call multipliers, calendar fields, and licence terms were retrieved from Tradefeeds' public API list, product page, and data terms in the same month.

Coverage And Calendar Fields

Tradefeeds' Macroeconomic Calendar API describes a sensible event schema. Each row carries a release time, a country code and name, the report title, the reference month (reportdate), the actual value, the previous value (last), a consensus estimate, a unit, and a numeric importance score where a higher value signals more market relevance. You can filter by country, date, and report name. That is the right core shape for a calendar, and the consensus and importance fields are useful for screening which events deserve attention.

What the public pages do not state is how many countries the calendar covers, how far back its history goes, or which sources each value comes from beyond "reliable sources". For a stock analyst glancing at the week ahead that may not matter. For an FX team running an event study on US CPI or Non-Farm Payrolls across ten years, it is the first question to answer.

FXMacroData covers 22 currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, CHF, NZD and fourteen more, including BRL, CNH, KRW, NOK, SEK and TWD) with 700+ indicator series, each sourced from the official statistics agency or central bank and labelled with source metadata. The release calendar sits alongside the announcement history, so the scheduled event and the released value share one schema.

Release Timing And Latency

Timing is where an economic calendar either supports trading automation or only supports reading. Tradefeeds' calendar row includes a release field described as the exact time and date the report is made public, but the checked pages do not say which time zone it uses, how quickly the actual value is filled after publication, or how often the calendar is refreshed. The only update-frequency claim we found on Tradefeeds' documentation applies to its Currency Pairs API, which is updated every 60 seconds.

FXMacroData records a second-level announcement_datetime on every release row, and releases are typically available within seconds of official publication. The target is one second from publication, and FXMacroData publishes the measured result on its release-speed page, broken down by source, including every release that took longer.

API Access, Format, And Rate Limits

Both products return JSON over REST. Tradefeeds' documentation examples authenticate by appending key=YOUR-KEY to the URL. That works, but keys in query strings tend to end up in proxy logs, browser history, and shared notebooks, so teams usually prefer header authentication. FXMacroData uses an X-API-Key header, publishes an OpenAPI schema in its API reference, and also offers SSE streaming for release events, GraphQL, and Python and JavaScript SDKs.

The rate-limit gap is the larger practical difference. A calendar workflow usually polls around scheduled releases. On Tradefeeds Basic, 12 calls per minute and roughly 1,800 calendar requests per month (after the 5x multiplier) leave little room to poll several countries during a busy data week. FXMacroData Individual allows 1,000,000 requests per month with bursts of 300 per minute, which comfortably covers polling, backfills, and dashboard refreshes for one developer.

A typical FXMacroData request for the latest US payrolls history looks like this:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.fxmacrodata.com/v1/announcements/usd/non_farm_payrolls"

{
  "data": [
    {
      "date": "2026-09-01",
      "val": 142.0,
      "prior": 89.0,
      "announcement_datetime": 1790944200
    }
  ]
}

Licence And Commercial Use

Tradefeeds' data terms allow you to process and display data within your internal operations or inside your own commercial products. They prohibit reselling or redistributing the data, using it to feed a competing data product, exposing raw data in public-facing applications, and continuing to store or use data after the subscription ends. Subscriptions renew every 30 days and payments are non-refundable under the same terms.

FXMacroData's paid plans cover internal and professional use, and for products that show data to other people there is a self-serve Commercial Redistribution add-on at $10/month per block of up to 100 measured users (or 1,000 public-feed followers). If you plan to show calendar data to your own clients, that difference is worth settling before you build.

AI And MCP Access

More macro research now runs through AI assistants. FXMacroData runs an official MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other MCP clients can query releases, the calendar, FX rates, and COT positioning directly, with source labels the assistant can cite. Tradefeeds' checked pages do not list an MCP server; an assistant would need custom tool code around its REST endpoints, and each call would draw on the same monthly allowance.

Where Tradefeeds Is Genuinely Stronger

Tradefeeds is a credible choice for a different buyer, and it has real strengths:

• Breadth across equities. One subscription covers company financial statements, SEC filings, ETF and mutual-fund holdings, analyst ratings, insider transactions, options chains, technical indicators, and stock news. FXMacroData does not cover individual stocks.
• Consensus and importance on the calendar row. Its calendar schema includes a consensus estimate and a numeric importance score, which makes simple screening of high-impact events easy.
• Low-cost first month. The discounted first period ($9 for four weeks on Basic) lets a developer test the integration cheaply before paying the full rate.
• Search-trend and sentiment data. Datasets such as search terms and volumes are unusual and may interest equity researchers.

If the calendar is a minor add-on to an equity product, Tradefeeds' bundle can be the more convenient purchase.

Where FXMacroData Is Stronger

FXMacroData is stronger wherever the macro release itself is the trading input. That covers event studies around the Federal Reserve and its policy rate decisions, automated alerts on data surprises, pair research on USD/JPY, and AI-assisted macro briefings.

Because the release calendar, announcement history, and market context live in one product, a single key also reaches COT positioning, government bond yields, commodity prices, and FX session timing. That makes it straightforward to put a data surprise in context without stitching providers together.

Decision Matrix

Recommendation

Choose Tradefeeds if your product is mostly about equities and you want a calendar of upcoming reports as a convenience inside a wider stock-data subscription. Its consensus and importance fields are useful, and the discounted first period makes it cheap to try.

Choose FXMacroData if the economic calendar and the released numbers are the core of what you build or trade. You get a lower entry price, a request allowance more than a hundred times larger than Tradefeeds Basic for calendar-style calls, official-source data across 22 currencies, second-level announcement timestamps with a public speed record, and MCP access for AI assistants. Compare plans on the pricing page, review endpoints in the API reference, check measured latency on the release-speed page, or start a 14-day trial.

Sources Checked

Competitor figures on this page come from Tradefeeds' public pages retrieved in October 2026. Where Tradefeeds does not publish a figure, this comparison says so instead of estimating.

Related Comparisons

If you are evaluating economic calendar APIs more widely, see FXMacroData vs FXStreet Economic Calendar API, FXMacroData vs Benzinga Economic Calendar API, FXMacroData vs Finnhub, and the roundup of the best macroeconomic data APIs for 2026.