Comparison · APILayer
Fiat Agent vs Currencylayer
Deep historical data and metals on paid tiers — with a 100-call free plan that runs out fast.
What
Currencylayer
Fiat Agent
Free tier
Currencylayer
100 calls a month, daily updates, non-commercial use.
Fiat Agent
Open endpoint, no key or card: 5 per second, 50 per hour, 50 per day per client. A new account also opens with a one-time 5,000-request signup bonus.
Paid entry point
Currencylayer
$14.99 a month for 10,000 requests, rising to $59.99 for 100,000.
Fiat Agent
No subscription. One-time top-up packs add to your balance; nothing renews, nothing expires.
Update cadence by plan
Currencylayer
Hourly on the entry plans, 10 minutes at $59.99, 60 seconds at $99.99.
Fiat Agent
The store refreshes on a fixed cadence; every response carries the timestamp of the reading behind it, so you never have to guess how old a quote is.
Base currency
Currencylayer
Source-currency switching is a paid feature.
Fiat Agent
Any published code, on both endpoints, with ?base=.
History
Currencylayer
Historical rates back to 1999; time-frame queries on higher plans.
Fiat Agent
Every reading ever stored, reachable by UTC date range with ?from= and ?to=, or as up to 2,000 recent readings with ?snapshots=.
Coverage
Currencylayer
168 currencies and precious metals including gold and silver.
Fiat Agent
The published fiat catalogue, quoted against one base and crossed by division. No metals.
Data
Currencylayer
Blended commercial and bank sources with a fallback algorithm.
Fiat Agent
Reference rates and the full currency catalogue with names, symbols and flags. Indicative data for quoting and display — not a trading feed.
Their figures are as published on their own pricing pages — check theirs before you buy, check ours before you plan
The short version
Currencylayer is built for depth: historical rates reaching back to 1999, precious metals alongside fiat codes, and time-frame queries on its higher plans. Its free plan is deliberately small — 100 calls a month with daily updates — so it functions as a trial rather than a working allowance.
Fiat Agent trades that depth for simplicity: a fiat catalogue, current and stored readings, one response shape, and a free portion that does not expire. Neither is the better product in the abstract; the useful question is whether you need metals and 1999, or a balance that behaves sensibly at low volume.
A free tier as a trial versus a free tier as a budget
A hundred calls a month is roughly three a day. That is enough to check the response shape and not much else — a single page render that fetches on every request will exhaust it before lunch. Fiat Agent's open endpoint is capped per second and per day rather than per month, so a development session is bounded by the day, not by the calendar.
Neither design is wrong. A monthly cap protects a vendor's margin; a daily window protects a developer's afternoon.
If you need metals, you need a different API
Currencylayer publishes gold and silver quotes. Fiat Agent does not, and will not pretend to: the catalogue is ISO fiat currency, read from a single provider and stored as reference readings. If your product prices metal, use a specialist feed for that leg.
What Fiat Agent does carry is the full published catalogue with each code's official name, display symbol and flag image, which is usually the part that takes time to assemble by hand.
Reading a stored range
History in Fiat Agent is a query on the same keyed endpoint: two UTC dates, both inclusive, and the response returns the readings that fall inside them sorted newest first.
curl · one month of stored readings
curl -s "https://fiatagent.base44.app/api/v1/rates?base=EUR&from=2026-10-01&to=2026-10-31" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $FIAT_AGENT_KEY"The honest split
Choose Currencylayer when
- You need precious metals or rates reaching back to 1999.
- You need 60-second updates and are happy to pay $99.99 a month for them.
- You want time-frame and currency-change queries as first-class endpoints.
Choose Fiat Agent when
- You need a working free tier rather than a trial.
- You quote fiat only and want any base currency without a plan upgrade.
- You would rather buy requests once than subscribe every month.
Currencylayer questions, answered
Does Fiat Agent support precious metals?
No. The catalogue is fiat currency only — ISO codes with their official names, symbols and flags. For gold or silver you need a metals feed.
Can I convert an amount, or only fetch rates?
Fiat Agent returns rates, not converted amounts, so the multiplication stays in your code where you can round it to your own currency rules. A cross rate is the quotient of two published quotes.
How far back does the history go?
Every reading the service has stored is retained, and a keyed call can request any range of them with ?from= and ?to=. The About page shows the timestamp of the most recent reading.
Test the claim in one request.
No key, no card: call the open endpoint on both services, compare the reading timestamps, and pick on evidence.