alphai-sdk

Typed Python client for the AlphaAI financial-news REST API — relevance-scored, ticker-linked news and SEC Form 4 insider data, built for AI agents and trading bots.

• Sync and async clients (Client / AsyncClient) over httpx
• Pydantic v2 response models — autocomplete, validation, Decimal money
• Cursor auto-pagination, automatic retry on 429/5xx, rate-limit inspection
• Typed errors and full coverage of the 9 public endpoints

API reference: https://api.alphai.io/api/schema/ · Developer guide: https://alphai.io/developers

Install

pip install alphai-sdk

Requires Python 3.10+. The import name is alphai.

Authentication

Create an API key at https://alphai.io/account/api-keys, then pass it explicitly or via the ALPHAI_API_KEY environment variable.

from alphai import Client

# reads $ALPHAI_API_KEY when api_key is omitted
with Client(api_key="ak_live_…") as client:
    page = client.news.list(symbol="NVDA")
    for article in page.results:
        print(article.title, "→", article.relevance_score)

Rate limits are per account and two-layer — a per-minute burst plus a per-day volume cap: Free 20/min · 100/day · Basic 60/min · 10,000/day · Pro 150/min · 100,000/day. News-archive depth is tiered too: Free keys page the feeds back 30 days, Basic 90, Pro 180 (paging past your horizon returns a 403 with an upgrade hint).

Quickstart

List & filter the feed

from alphai import Client, NewsCategory

with Client() as client:
    page = client.news.list(
        symbol="NVDA",
        category=[NewsCategory.EARNINGS, "insider"],  # enum or str; OR-matched
        min_relevance=7,
        collapse_stories=True,  # dedupe syndicated reprints
        page_size=20,  # 10 default; 1-20 on any key, 21-50 needs Pro
    )
    print(page.next_cursor)  # opaque cursor for the next (older) page
    print(page.has_more)

Pull a date window

from_date / to_date bound the feed to a publication window (inclusive), the same names the MCP tools use. A datetime.date or a bare YYYY-MM-DD string means the whole day, so equal bounds return that day, not an empty page; a datetime is an exact instant (naive is read as UTC):

from datetime import date

with Client() as client:
    july = client.news.list(
        symbol="NVDA",
        from_date=date(2026, 7, 1),
        to_date=date(2026, 7, 31),  # through July 31 23:59:59.999999 UTC
    )

The window respects your plan's archive depth (past the horizon is a 403 on the first page) and applies to the default sort="published" mode only — delta polling never walks back into history, so combining a window with sort="ingested" is a 400. On news.insider the window bounds when the filing reached the feed, not the trade date inside the insider block.

Poll for what is new (sort="ingested")

Articles reach the feed after their publish time, so a poller that tracks time_published silently skips late arrivals. sort="ingested" orders the feed by arrival instead, and its cursor is a polling position rather than an end-of-feed marker:

cursor = load_cursor()  # None on the first run

with Client() as client:
    page = client.news.list(
        sort="ingested", cursor=cursor, symbol="NVDA", page_size=20, min_relevance=7
    )
    for article in page.results:
        handle(article)  # article.original.created_at = when we received it
    save_cursor(page.next_cursor)  # always set; empty results = caught up

    # Ask the page, never the cursor: in this mode next_cursor is never null,
    # so `caught_up` (and its inverse `has_more`) is the only honest signal.
    if page.caught_up:
        sleep_until_next_poll()

Pass the same sort on every call of a run. Each mode mints its own cursor family, so replaying an ingested cursor into the default mode is a 400, not a silent restart. Cursors are opaque: hand one back unchanged, never build one.

Keep up with the feed. A delta poll returns one page, so a poller that drains slower than the feed publishes drifts backwards and its articles read as hours old — the data is current, the position is not. Raise page_size and narrow the stream (min_relevance, symbol, category) until one poll covers one interval, and remember the per-day call cap bounds how much of the feed a plan can drain at all.

On Free and Basic the archive horizon applies to where a poll resumes, so a cursor left unused for longer than your window comes back 403 (extra.reason = "archive_horizon"). Poll on your plan's cadence and you will not see it; Pro has no window.

Auto-paginate

iter() follows the cursor for you and flattens articles across pages:

with Client() as client:
    for article in client.news.iter(category="earnings", max_items=100):
        print(article.uid, article.title)

Single article, trending, related, insider

with Client() as client:
    client.news.trending()  # top ≤10 from the last 48h
    art = client.news.get("788e477c66f3849b")
    client.news.related(art.uid)  # up to 6 related articles
    client.news.insider(symbol="NVDA")  # SEC Form 4 feed (or .insider_iter())

Symbols & rollups

from decimal import Decimal

with Client() as client:
    client.symbols.list(limit=100)  # active tickers (bare list)
    nvda = client.symbols.get("NVDA")  # detail (404 if unknown)
    btc = client.symbols.get("BTC-USD")  # crypto + foreign listings too
    # Multi-market: .asset_type ("Stock"/"ETF"/"Crypto"), .country, .currency,
    # .supports_insider (US SEC names only). Crypto is "<SYM>-USD"; foreign uses
    # the Yahoo suffix (e.g. "VOD.L").
    sent = client.symbols.sentiment_summary("NVDA")  # 7-day AI sentiment
    ins = client.symbols.insider_summary("NVDA")  # 30-day Form 4 rollup
    assert isinstance(ins.buy_value_usd, Decimal | None)  # money is Decimal

Async

Every method mirrors the sync client with await; iter() is an async generator:

import asyncio
from alphai import AsyncClient


async def main() -> None:
    async with AsyncClient() as client:
        async for article in client.news.iter(symbol="NVDA", max_items=20):
            print(article.title)


asyncio.run(main())

Example projects

• alphai-news-to-email — a small, deployable app that emails you a deduplicated digest of high-relevance news for your watchlist. Built entirely on this SDK.

Errors

All errors derive from AlphaAIError:

from alphai import Client, RateLimitError, NotFoundError, AuthenticationError

with Client() as client:
    try:
        client.symbols.get("ZZZZ")
    except NotFoundError:
        ...
    except RateLimitError as e:
        print("retry after", e.retry_after, "seconds; limit", e.limit)
    except AuthenticationError:
        ...

GET requests are automatically retried on 429 / 5xx / connection errors (max_retries, default 2) with jittered backoff that honors Retry-After (capped at max_retry_after, default 60s, so a bad value can't freeze your process). A 2xx with a non-JSON / empty body raises InvalidResponseError.

Rate-limit budget

Every keyed response carries the X-RateLimit-* trio. The last one seen is on the client:

with Client() as client:
    client.news.list()
    rl = client.last_rate_limit
    if rl:
        print(f"{rl.remaining}/{rl.limit} left, resets at {rl.reset}")

Configuration

Client(
    api_key=None,  # else $ALPHAI_API_KEY
    base_url="https://api.alphai.io",  # API host
    timeout=30.0,
    max_retries=2,  # clamped to >= 0
    backoff_factor=0.5,
    max_retry_after=60.0,  # cap on honored Retry-After (seconds)
    user_agent="alphai-sdk-python/<version>",
    http_client=None,  # bring your own httpx.Client (advanced)
)

The same keyword arguments apply to AsyncClient. When you pass a custom http_client, the SDK still applies its Authorization header and base URL on every request — your client just supplies the transport (proxies, custom timeout, mounts). You own its lifecycle (the SDK won't close a client you passed in).

Development

uv venv && uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
ruff check . && ruff format --check .
mypy src/alphai
pytest                       # offline suite
pytest -m integration        # live tests (needs ALPHAI_API_KEY)

License

MIT — see LICENSE. API access still requires a valid key.