Alternatives to the Free Currency Converter API

As you may have noticed, the Free Currency Converter API service is no longer available on this domain. Instead, this site now aims to become a universal reference guide for developers and companies looking for free, cost-effective currency converter web services & APIs. 

In case you have not already, take a look at our Full API Comparison.

As a quick heads up on our conclusions - if you're still looking for an alternative to our former API service, you might want to sign up for the currencylayer API's Free Plan. It is entirely free, lets you make more than a thousand monthly calls and offers a wide range of features. 

You could also have a look at the Xignite API, although they do not provide a free subscription plan, they do offer a free 7-day trial for 250 API calls. 

I'd like to give you brief summaries about both of the above mentioned services below:

currencylayer API 

Focused on performance, accuracy and ease of integration, the currencylayer API offers free real-time exchange rate and currency conversion services to developers and startups around the world. 

 currencylayer JSON API

Features: 

• Free Plan available

• 168 World Currencies & Precious Metals 

• Reliable Data Sources

• Real-time Rates (Hourly to 60 seconds)

• Historical Data back to 1999

• Currency Conversion Endpoint 

• and more ... 

Paid Subscription prices: $12 - $79 per month

Xignite API

Features: 

• 7-day Free Trial

• 170 World Currencies

• Superior Data Coverage

• "True" Real-time Rates

• Historical Data back to 1999

• and more ... 

Paid Subscription prices: $1000 - 10,000 per year

Have a great weekend!

The Free Currency Converter API - Team

There will always be abusers of free things

I was shocked when someone reported that my service is getting slow. Upon checking, I noticed that there are devs who abused the service by send tons of requests in a short span of time. I setup a counter for my API and was more shocked to see the numbers.

How many? The top user sends more than a whopping 100,000++ requests to the server in less than one hour! This is crazy. The second highest sends around 10,000+ requests per hour. Because of this, I have to blacklist these abusers. I have updated my terms of service that the free API will have a limit of 3,000 requests in one hour which is more than fair. So far, everything is back to normal.

Guys, please be considerate of other users. Design your system well and do not abuse the free service. Thank you.

Added JSONP Support for Client Side Calls

Initially, this service was made for server side usage. I received an email request to support client side API calls. The problem is by default browsers do not allow ajax calls from a different domain. They call it the "Same Origin Policy" or SOP. This is a security feature which blocks script calls from different domains because it's potentially unsafe.

I learned that there is a workaround to this issue. You can actually support client side API calls through the use of JSONP or "JSON with padding". This allows client side javascript programs to get data from server with a different domain.

In this service, specifying a "callback" parameter automatically transforms the result to jsonp.

Example:
http://www.freecurrencyconverterapi.com/api/v2/convert?q=USD_PHP&compact=y&callback=sampleCallback

Ko-Fi.com is down, made custom donation coffee cups instead

Previously, I used ko-fi.com service to create a "buy me coffee" donation option for visitors. Recently, Ko-Fi website suddenly went down for reasons unknown so I was forced to use Paypal's official way of creating donation buttons. I decided to get a bit creative..

I downloaded a stock photo of a coffee papercup

Edited it a little


It did undergo several versions, until voila!

I had fund customizing that I decided to offer different sizes. So there it is, my custom "buy me coffee" donation style. You are free to use the style above.

Decided to remove ads from this website

This site was created to provide free, high performance and intuitive currency conversion services to software developers and website administrations. It also provides quick converter calculators to end users to calculate one currency to another.

Even though this service is free, it still costs me to provide this service. Previously, I placed an ad on this website with the idea that this can be a self-sustaining site because there are costs in running a website like this. Costs include the domain, hosting fees and the coffee I need to maintain this site.

Now, I decided to remove the ad and turn to donation based funding because sites like this really don't benefit much from 3rd party advertisements, at least not yet.

The ads have been removed. Visitors who appreciate the free service and would like to help maintain the website and buy me a coffee instead.

Free currency conversion tool

http://www.freecurrencyconverterapi.com has just been launched. It offers free web services to developers and web admins to convert one currency to another. You are free to use this for personal or commercial application however it offers no warranty.

Currency values are updated every 30 minutes. If you need a realtime web service or a service that updates more frequent, you may contact me for more information.

Convert queries accepts a maximum of 10 conversion parameters to avoid abuse of the service and to help maintain the health of the web services. If you need more than the limit, you may contact me for more information.