Add Stock And Crypto Investing To Your App With Alpaca

Say you run a business and your customers keep asking whether they can invest through you. Maybe you are a budgeting app, a payroll product, or a community platform, and you want people to open an account, put money in, and buy a stock or some crypto without leaving what you built. You do not want to become a brokerage to do that. Alpaca lets you offer it through an API, which is a way for your software, or an AI assistant working on your behalf, to ask Alpaca to do the work and get the answer back.

What Alpaca does

Alpaca describes itself as an API-first, commission-free stock and crypto trading broker, offering trading, market data, options, and broker-as-a-service APIs. Broker-as-a-service means Alpaca holds the brokerage side of things while you own the customer experience. Alpaca also publishes its OpenAPI specifications publicly, which are machine-readable descriptions of every call its APIs accept. You can learn more on the Alpaca website.

What you can get done

Retail Investing

This is the heart of it: opening investing accounts for individuals and placing their trades. Your app can sign someone up, keep their details current, show what they have ordered, and close things down cleanly when they leave.

• POST /v1/accounts creates a new brokerage account for a customer.
• GET /v1/accounts/{account_id} looks up one customer’s account.
• PATCH /v1/accounts/{account_id} updates a customer’s account details.
• GET /v1/trading/accounts/{account_id}/orders lists the orders a customer has placed.
• DELETE /v1/trading/accounts/{account_id}/orders cancels every open order on an account at once.

Market & Financial Data

People want to see prices before they buy. This capability gives you the numbers to show: recent trades, price bars (the open, high, low and close over a stretch of time), and which symbols are moving the most today.

• GET /v1beta1/crypto/trades/latest gets the latest trades for several crypto symbols.
• GET /v1beta1/crypto/{symbol}/trades gets the trade history for one crypto symbol.
• GET /v1beta1/crypto/bars gets price bars for several crypto symbols, the data behind a chart.
• GET /v1beta1/screener/{market_type}/movers returns the top market movers.

Data & Reference Information Services

Markets keep hours and close for holidays. Before your app promises that an order will go through now, it can check whether the market is open and when it opens next.

• GET /v2/clock tells you whether the market is open right now.
• GET /v2/calendar returns the US market calendar of trading days and hours.
• GET /v2/calendar/{market} returns the calendar for a specific market.

Developer Identity & Credential Management

If customers already have their own Alpaca accounts, your app can ask their permission to act on their behalf instead of collecting passwords. That is OAuth, a standard way for someone to say “yes, this app may trade for me.”

• POST /v1/oauth/authorize asks a customer to authorize your app.
• POST /v1/oauth/token issues the token your app uses once they say yes.
• GET /v1/oauth/clients/{client_id} looks up your registered app.

Getting started

Alpaca is a hosted service with self-serve signup, so you call its endpoints rather than running anything yourself. The pricing section on APIs.io lists a Free plan at $0/mo, a good way to try it before you commit. Start with the documentation for the part you need: the Broker API for opening accounts for your customers, the Market Data API for prices, and OAuth with the Trading API for acting on behalf of existing Alpaca customers.

The Alpaca profile on APIs.io gathers everything in one place, including the Accounts API, the Crypto Pricing Data API, the Funding API for moving money in and out, and the Calendar API.

If your customers are asking to invest, read the Broker API docs first and sketch the one screen where someone opens an account, because that is the call everything else builds on.