StockNewsAPI alternative: same price, plus a real-time stream

StockNewsAPI is the reference point for cheap, ticker-tagged financial news, and H1 News API keeps its two price points on purpose: $19.99 for 20,000 calls and $49.99 for 50,000, both with a 5-day, 100-call trial. Where the two differ is everything the quota buys.

Side by side

StockNewsAPI column from stocknewsapi.com/pricing as of September 2026. Both services filter by ticker, source, type, sentiment and date, and paginate.

The same call, the same idea

If you have code against StockNewsAPI, the mental model transfers: one HTTP call, ticker and sentiment filters, a date preset, a page of results with a total.

# Same request on either service — the shape is deliberately familiar
curl -H 'X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY' \
  'https://api.heliusone.com/v1/news?ticker=NVDA&sentiment=negative&date=last7days&limit=5'

{
  "total": 41,
  "page": 1,
  "pages": 9,
  "results": [
    {
      "id": 598112,
      "title": "Evercore ISI Raises Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) Price Target To $380 As iPhone Demand Holds",
      "summary": "…",
      "url": "https://…",
      "source": "Google News: Analyst Actions",
      "type": "article",
      "category": "markets",
      "language": "en",
      "region": "us",
      "tickers": ["AAPL"],
      "sentiment": { "label": "positive", "score": 0.71 },
      "published_at": "2026-09-19T14:47:02+00:00",
      "ingested_at": "2026-09-19T14:52:10+00:00"
    }
  ]
}

Every article carries the same fields, whatever the source: tickers, sentiment.label and sentiment.score (−1 to +1), category, type, language, region, and two timestamps — published_at from the publisher and ingested_at from us, so you can measure latency yourself.

What the Pro plan buys that polling cannot

StockNewsAPI's Premium plan is Basic with more calls and more endpoints. H1's Pro plan changes the delivery model: a WebSocket that pushes each article the moment it is ingested, filtered server-side so you only pay attention to what you asked for.

wss://api.heliusone.com/v1/stream?api_key=YOUR_KEY&tickers=NVDA,AAPL&categories=earnings,halts

One connection costs one API call; every pushed article is free. The stream reconnects are handled in the Python and TypeScript SDKs, which also replay any gap through since_id so delivery is gapless. See the WebSocket guide.

You can see the sources

The single biggest practical difference is that your key can enumerate what you are buying, filter on it and exclude it:

curl -H 'X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY' 'https://api.heliusone.com/v1/sources?active_only=true'
# → 130+ named sources with article counts: "Federal Reserve", "European Central Bank",
#   "SEC EDGAR 8-K", "Nasdaq Trade Halts", "Google News: FDA Approvals", the wires,
#   the financial dailies, the regional press, …

Every name is a valid source= or exclude_source= value on /v1/news and on the stream. Prefer wires over commentary? type=press_release. Only want primary documents? type=filing.

Moving over

1. Start a trial on the plan that matches your current one — the quotas line up.
2. Swap the base URL and the header (X-API-Key), and map the response: StockNewsAPI's data[] is our results[]; news_url is url; tickers and sentiment keep their names, with sentiment becoming an object with a score.
3. Replace your polling loop with since_id polling (Basic) or the stream (Pro). Either way you stop refetching pages you have already seen.
4. Add the things you could not get before: category=halts, category=filings, category=regulatory, region=.

If you hit anything that does not map, email support with the call you are trying to port; migrations are the questions we answer fastest.