Comparison · APILayer
Fiat Agent vs exchangerate.host
Nineteen years of end-of-day history — on a monthly allowance of a hundred calls.
What
exchangerate.host
Fiat Agent
Free tier
exchangerate.host
100 requests a month on a free key.
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
exchangerate.host
$14.99 a month for 10,000 requests; volume billed monthly, with overage fees past the cap.
Fiat Agent
No subscription. One-time top-up packs add to your balance; nothing renews, nothing expires.
Updates
exchangerate.host
End-of-day readings, published around 00:05 GMT for the previous day; current-rate endpoints on paid volume.
Fiat Agent
The store is refreshed on a fixed cadence and every response states the timestamp of the reading behind it.
Base currency
exchangerate.host
Any base currency via ?base=.
Fiat Agent
Any published code, on both endpoints, with ?base=.
History
exchangerate.host
Historical and time-series endpoints, end-of-day, roughly 19 years deep.
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=.
When the volume runs out
exchangerate.host
Monthly allowance, then overage billing rather than a hard stop.
Fiat Agent
The balance is spent, then topped up when you choose. Nothing is charged automatically.
Coverage
exchangerate.host
About 168 fiat currencies plus precious metals and crypto.
Fiat Agent
The published fiat catalogue, quoted against one base and crossed by division. No metals, no crypto.
Throttling
exchangerate.host
Monthly request allowance per plan.
Fiat Agent
The open endpoint is rate-limited per client. A key is capped per key on bursts, never on volume: spending is bounded by the one-time balance.
Their figures are as published on their own pricing pages — check theirs before you buy, check ours before you plan
The short version
exchangerate.host is an APILayer product, and it shows: two decades of end-of-day history, precious metals and crypto alongside fiat, and the same unified dashboard its sibling APIs share. If you need historical data with a fixed, official-sounding timestamp per day, that is a genuine strength.
Its free key is deliberately narrow — a hundred requests a month, which is a trial rather than a working allowance — and the billing is the familiar monthly one, with overages past the cap. Fiat Agent takes the opposite shape: an open endpoint with no key for evaluation, a one-time balance that never resets, and history read from the same keyed request as the current rates.
A hundred calls a month is three a day
A hundred requests sounds workable until you divide it: roughly three per day, or enough for a single development session. Any page that fetches on each request will exhaust it in an afternoon, and then you are waiting for the calendar rather than fixing the feature.
That is not a criticism of the design — a monthly cap protects the vendor's margin, and every provider in this category has one. It does mean the free tier answers "does the response shape suit me?" rather than "can I ship on this?".
End-of-day data has a real use, and it is not display
An end-of-day reading is the right figure for accounting, reconciliation and anything that will be compared against a bank statement: one canonical value per day, timestamped once, that does not move when you re-open the report. If that is your requirement, a daily official series is more correct than a fresher one.
A page that shows a customer what something costs right now wants the other thing — a reading that changed with the market and says how old it is. Fiat Agent exists for that case and publishes the reading timestamp on every response so a displayed price can always be traced to a moment.
Overages versus a balance
Subscription billing is comfortable when the volume is steady: the same 10,000 calls a month, forecastable, one invoice. The trade is that a quiet month costs the same as a loud one, and a loud one produces an overage line.
A one-time balance behaves the inverse way: a quiet month costs nothing because nothing is charged, and a loud one spends what you bought. Neither is cheaper in the abstract — it depends entirely on whether your call volume is flat.
curl · the same read, against Fiat Agent
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 exchangerate.host when
- You need a long end-of-day history with one official figure per day.
- You need precious metals or crypto codes in the same response as fiat.
- You already run other APILayer APIs and want one key and one dashboard.
Choose Fiat Agent when
- You want to evaluate the data with no key, no card and no signup.
- Your call volume is uneven and an unused month should cost nothing.
- You want current rates and a date-range history from one request shape.
exchangerate.host questions, answered
Is Fiat Agent cheaper than exchangerate.host?
Below a few thousand calls a month, usually yes: the 5,000-request signup bonus covers it and nothing renews. Above that, exchangerate.host's $14.99 plan is a forecastable monthly bill while a Fiat Agent balance is spent once. Take your own monthly call count to the pricing page and do that arithmetic — it is the only one that decides it.
Can I read history without a subscription here?
Yes. History is served from the keyed endpoint, and a key comes with the signup bonus, so ?from= and ?to= work without paying anything. What Fiat Agent cannot offer is nineteen years of it — the store begins when the service began.
Does Fiat Agent handle metals or crypto?
No. The catalogue is ISO fiat currency only. If your product prices gold or bitcoin, use a specialist feed for that leg rather than a fiat reference API.
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.