Free Pinnacle Odds API: What You Get for $0 and Where It Stops

Short version: you can pull Pinnacle's live and prematch prices in JSON today for nothing. The free trial key needs no card, never expires, and gives you 100 REST requests a day across every sport and market. What it does not give you is push. If you need odds-drop alerts the second they happen, or the raw WebSocket frames, that is a paid plan. Everything below is about making the free tier do as much as it honestly can.

What "free" usually means in this market

Since Pinnacle withdrew its public API in July 2025, every "free Pinnacle API" you will find is a third-party feed with a free layer on top. The free layers come in three shapes, and they are not interchangeable:

• A demo key or sandbox. You get a response, but it is delayed, truncated to a couple of events, or both. Good for seeing the schema, useless for a model.
• A credit allowance. A few hundred credits a month on an aggregator. Each market you request costs credits, so a full Pinnacle board for one sport can eat a day's allowance in one call.
• A rate-limited real key. Live data, full schema, capped by requests rather than by data volume.

pinnodds is the third kind. The cap is on how often you ask, not on how much comes back, and that difference is what makes the tier usable.

What the free key includes

The trial key is a real key. It hits the same endpoints, returns the same payloads and sees the same prices as a paid key.

So the question is not "is the free data worse". It is not. The question is whether 100 pulls a day is enough for what you are building.

Spending 100 requests well

The mistake people make on a capped key is treating it like a scraper: hit everything every minute, run out by breakfast, conclude the tier is useless. A few habits change that.

One call is a whole board. /kit/v1/markets?sport_id=1 returns every live soccer event with its moneyline, every spread, every total and every period. That is one request, not one per match. If you want to watch live soccer all evening, polling every fifteen minutes is 20 calls for a five-hour window.

Fetch fixtures once, lines on demand. For prematch, pull /kit/v1/prematch/fixtures?sport_id=5 once in the morning. That gives you the event ids for the day. Then call /kit/v1/prematch/lines?event_id=… only for the games you care about, when you care about them.

Use the drops buffer instead of diffing. You do not have to poll a board and compute what moved. /api/drops?mode=live&sport_id=1&min_drop_pct=5&max_age_sec=600 returns the price falls of the last ten minutes in one call, with the from and to prices and the no-vig fair price already attached. One request every ten minutes is 144 a day, so stretch it to every fifteen and you are inside the cap with room to spare.

Cache the sport list. /kit/v1/details and the sport ids do not change. Do not fetch them per run.

Here is a plan that stays under 100 and still gives you something real:

06:00  prematch fixtures, 2 sports            2 calls
08:00–23:00  live board for 1 sport, every 15 min   ~60 calls
08:00–23:00  live drops, every 30 min              ~30 calls
                                                   -----
                                                    92 calls

That is a working odds monitor for the price of nothing.

Where the free tier stops

Be clear about this part, because it is where "free" marketing usually goes quiet.

You cannot stream. The SSE endpoint keeps a connection open and pushes every qualifying drop within roughly 30 to 150 ms of Pinnacle moving the price. The WebSocket passthrough does the same for every frame. Both are paid, because an open connection is a standing cost we cannot hand out for free. If your edge depends on reacting inside a few seconds, the free key is for building and testing, not for running.

100 a day is a hard wall. The 101st request returns HTTP 429 with a window=day hint and the counter resets at midnight UTC. There is no burst allowance and no rollover.

20 a minute is a soft wall. Short bursts over it are also 429. Space your calls.

No historical odds. This is true of every plan, not just the free one. pinnodds is a live feed. If you need history, record the stream yourself.

When to pay

Three signals that you have outgrown the free key:

1. You are polling a board to detect moves and wish you were being told about them. That is the Stream plan, $99/mo, SSE drops included.
2. You need more than one sport at better than fifteen-minute resolution. That is Pro, $99/mo, 10 requests a second.
3. You want the raw frames to build your own state. That is the WebSocket add-on or Scale.

Until one of those is true, stay free. There is no time limit on the key and nobody will email you about it.

Get a key

The key is issued from the panel in about a minute. No card, no Pinnacle account, no verification call. If you would rather look before you sign up, the live Pinnacle odds boards show the same feed in a browser, no key at all.

pinnodds is an independent service and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Pinnacle.