Build inflation dashboards, embed prices in articles, or pipe the Basket Index into your own products. Every endpoint is free, with no key and nothing to sign up for. There are no paid API tiers. The one thing you can buy is a Local Cost Brief — a sourced, dated cost report for a geography you choose — and it is a document, not data access.
https://basketindex.org/api/public
There is none, and there is nothing to sign up for. Every endpoint below is open. A Bearer token is accepted and ignored: no token in existence grants anything, so sending one changes nothing about the data you get back.
curl https://basketindex.org/api/public/eggs
If you are building something that would break when this changes, tell us what you need — we would rather know before we change it than after.
Stated plainly: none of these are enforced yet. There is one open tier today, capped at 600 months of history per request, and no throttling. The table is the shape we expect to grow into, not a price list — nothing is for sale and there is no way to pay for it.
| Tier | Status | Rate limit | Indicative price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open | Live today | Not enforced | Free |
| Higher volume | Not built | — | — |
| Bulk / licensed | Not built | — | Tell us what you need |
Responses carry X-RateLimit-Limit and X-API-Tier headers, but treat them as advisory: no limit is currently applied, and the tier is always anonymous.
/api/public/basket-indexThe flagship Basket Index™ series for a (region, household) pair.
https://basketindex.org/api/public/basket-index?region=US&household=family-of-4
{
"meta": { "version": "v1", "attribution": "Basket Index" },
"data": {
"region": { "code": "US", "name": "United States" },
"household": { "slug": "family-of-4", "name": "Family of 4" },
"base": { "year": 2020, "month": 1, "value": 100 },
"points": [
{ "date": "2020-01-01", "index": 100.0, "basketCostUsd": 1834.12 },
...
],
"summary": {
"current": 132.4,
"oneMonthChangePct": 0.3,
"twelveMonthChangePct": 4.2
}
}
}/api/public/itemsList every tracked item plus its canonical upstream series id.
https://basketindex.org/api/public/items
/api/public/{slug}Latest monthly observations + summary metrics for a single item.
https://basketindex.org/api/public/gasoline?region=TX&months=24
{
"meta": { ... },
"data": {
"item": { "slug": "gasoline", "unit": "gallon", "source": "EIA", ... },
"region": { "code": "TX", "name": "Texas" },
"observations": [
{ "date": "2024-05-01", "value": 2.94, "source": "EIA" },
...
],
"summary": {
"current": 3.18,
"oneMonthChangePct": 0.4,
"twelveMonthChangePct": -3.1,
"historicalHigh": { "value": 4.91, "date": "2022-06-01" },
"historicalLow": { "value": 1.81, "date": "2020-05-01" }
}
}
}Underlying data is in the public domain (US federal works). Basket Index™ adds ingest, normalization, regional derivation, and the proprietary index formula — these are licensed for non-commercial use during preview. If you are a commercial publisher or product and want to use them, tell us what you are building — we would rather grant permission than have a preview clause quietly stop useful work.
Cite as: "Basket Index™, [date], basketindex.org/api/public/{slug}".