Alpaca is a U.S.-based brokerage platform built API-first. It lets developers, quants, and fintech startups trade U.S. stocks, ETFs, and crypto programmatically without paying commissions.
You don’t use Alpaca like a traditional retail trading app. You plug it into your own software, bot, or product.
If you’re building automated trading systems, robo-advisors, or fintech products, most brokers get in the way. Alpaca removes that friction.
You get real brokerage accounts, live markets, paper trading, and market data — all designed for code-first workflows. This saves months of integration work and avoids expensive enterprise brokerage contracts.
Best fit: developers, algo traders, hedge-fund-lite teams, and startups embedding trading into their apps.
Alpaca provides REST and streaming APIs for:
- Trading (live and paper)
- Market data (real-time and historical)
- Account management and reporting
You connect via API keys, choose paper or live trading, and execute trades from your own code. SDKs are available for Python, JavaScript, Go, and more.
