Frequently Asked Questions

Start with the limit, because it is the honest answer: we grant no rights in the data — none, in any form. We are a delivery service. We hold no licence from any upstream source, so permission over the underlying prices is not ours to give, and no plan, tier, or fee changes that. What we sell is access: continuous collection, one consistent schema, history, uptime, and support. What you can do with a given series depends on where that series comes from, never on what you pay us. Internal use — dashboards, pricing models, analysis, and reporting inside your own organisation — raises no rights question at all, and is what the API is built and priced for. If your use is customer-facing, read the next two answers before you build.

The distinction is the source, not the plan. Our EIA-sourced series — including the US retail diesel and gasoline prices — are works of the US government and are in the public domain at the source. That status comes from the source; it is not a permission we issue, and it is not ours to issue. No permission from us is involved either way, and none is needed from us. Everything else is a different situation: for third-party-sourced series such as LBMA metals fixings, exchange futures, and ICE / EU carbon, we hold no redistribution or public-display rights and cannot convey any. No agreement with us, at any tier, can change that — the rights would have to come from the originating publisher. We would rather tell you this before you ship than after.

Two different things get confused here. For government-sourced series, credit the originating agency — for example "Source: U.S. EIA". That is the agency's convention and good practice, not a condition we impose; we are not a party to it. Separately, if you embed one of our widgets, keep the "Powered by OilPriceAPI" link. That one is our ask, and it is about our software, which we did write and do own. Attribution to us is never a substitute for a right in the data, and several customers have offered it as though it were — it does not work that way, because the right was never ours to trade.

They're two different things, so pick by what you need. Our real-time market series (WTI, Brent, Henry Hub natural gas) update every few minutes during market hours — use these for live dashboards, alerts, and trading. Our official EIA series (such as WTI Cushing spot, Henry Hub spot, and weekly natural gas storage) follow the U.S. EIA's publication schedule — spot figures are daily and storage is weekly (released Thursdays), with EIA's normal reporting lag — use these when you need the official government reference number rather than sub-second latency. If you're after 'live EIA data,' the real-time market series is almost always the right fit: 'EIA' refers to the official source and its cadence, not to real-time speed.

Yes — and be careful what that yes covers, because it is narrower than it sounds. All plans, including the free tier, may be used commercially: many businesses, trading platforms, and financial applications build on the API. That is about your subscription to our service, and your subscription is the only thing we are in a position to sell you. It is not a grant of rights over the underlying price data. We hold no licence from any upstream source, so permission over the data is not ours to give and we give none. If your commercial use means showing the data to your own users, read "Can I display your data on my website" above — that is the question you are actually asking.

There are two separate no-cost things, and people routinely mistake one for the other. The Free plan is ongoing — it does not expire, and it stays available for as long as you want it. Separately, every new account gets a short full-featured trial with a much larger request allowance, so you can evaluate the paid tiers properly before deciding. Neither requires a credit card. When the trial ends you are not cut off; you simply fall back to the ongoing Free plan. Your dashboard always shows which one you are currently on and how much of your allowance is left — that is the authoritative answer for your account, rather than anything we could hardcode on this page. See the pricing page for current allowances.

One request is one API call. A call that returns 200 prices is still one request, so the cheapest way to stay inside an allowance is usually to ask for more per call rather than to call more often. Work out your ceiling before you pick a plan: if you poll one endpoint every 5 minutes during a 9am–4pm working day, that is roughly 84 calls a day and about 1,850 a month — well inside the entry paid tier, and probably not what you feared. Cached responses that we serve from the edge still count. Rate limits and allowances are listed per plan on the pricing page, which is the single source of truth for what each tier costs and includes — we deliberately do not restate prices here, because a stale number on this page is worse than no number.

It varies by series, and it matters more than it used to — because provenance, not your plan, determines what you can do with a given number. Some series are collected from US government publishers such as the EIA; those are public-domain at the source. Others are collected from public market sources and third-party publishers; those carry the originating publisher's restrictions, which we cannot lift. We normalise all of it into one schema, run it on a schedule, monitor it for freshness, and keep it up — that is the product. We are not a party to any exchange or price-reporting agency, we are not a licensed distributor for any of them, and we do not claim to be. The Redistribution page lists what comes from where.

Prices are collected from their publishers, validated against per-commodity sanity ranges, and cross-checked for consistency before they are served. Accuracy is bounded by the upstream publisher — we do not compute or model prices ourselves, and where a source is wrong we will be wrong with it. If you need to reconcile against an official figure, use the government-published series (for example the EIA spot and retail series), which are the reference numbers most auditors and counterparties will expect. Our data is for information; it is not suitable as a settlement price, contract benchmark, or official record. For those, go to the official source directly.

Almost always because the series updates on its publisher's schedule, not on ours — and this is the most common support question we get. Live market series move every few minutes during market hours and are flat when the market is closed (including weekends and holidays). Official government series follow their agency's release calendar: EIA retail fuel prices are weekly, natural gas storage is weekly on Thursdays, and several series skip US federal holidays. A price that has not moved since Friday is usually correct, not broken. Every response carries a timestamp for exactly this reason — trust the timestamp over your expectation of cadence, and check the documentation for the publication schedule of the specific series you are using.

Depth varies by series, and the honest answer is that it depends which one you need: the major crude benchmarks go back furthest, while newer or more specialised series start when their publisher started publishing them. Rather than trust a number on this page that will drift, query the history endpoint for the series you care about and look at the earliest timestamp it returns — that is the real answer for your series, today. History is served through the same API as everything else, so you can page through it and write it to CSV yourself in a few lines; there is no separate export product, and bulk backfills of long ranges will consume request allowance in proportion to what you pull. If you are planning a large one-off backfill, talk to us first so we can tell you the cheapest way to do it rather than have you discover it through your usage bill.

Both major crude benchmarks (WTI and Brent), natural gas (US Henry Hub and UK), refined products including gasoil and retail diesel and gasoline, coal, carbon, precious metals, and marine and bunker fuels with detailed specifications for MGO, HFO, and MDO. Futures curves are available on plans that include futures access. Coverage genuinely does change, so the documentation carries the current list of commodity codes rather than this page. If the series you need is not there, tell us — a large share of what we have added was added because a customer asked for it by name, and we would rather know that you needed something we did not have.

Yes — every commodity series is published in USD, and there are no per-currency variants of a benchmark (there is no EUR or CAD Brent code to find; if you are guessing at one, it does not exist). If you need another currency, we also publish forex pairs, so you can convert at the rate and timestamp that suits your use case rather than one we picked for you. That is deliberate: the right conversion rate for a settlement is rarely the right one for a dashboard.

In order of how often it turns out to be the cause: the account has not been confirmed yet (check for the confirmation email — an unconfirmed account can hold a key that will not authenticate); the key is being sent in the wrong header (it belongs in the Authorization header as a token, not as a query parameter); the key was regenerated and an old copy is still deployed somewhere; or the plan's allowance is exhausted, which returns a payment-required response rather than a 401. Your dashboard shows your active keys and current usage. If none of that explains it, send us the request ID from the error body — every error response carries one, and it lets us find your exact request rather than guess.

Both are self-serve from your dashboard: upgrade, downgrade, or cancel without talking to anyone, and see the pricing page for what each tier currently costs and includes. Cancelling stops future billing and leaves your access running to the end of the period you have already paid for. If you want to stop receiving email from us but keep the account, use the unsubscribe link in any email — you do not have to delete your account to make the email stop, and if the emails did not stop when you asked, tell us, because that is a bug and we want to know about it.