Ticker Line

Ticker Line is a web API that generates sparkline charts for financial assets through a simple URL. You drop an image tag into your HTML, Markdown, or anywhere that supports images, and it returns an SVG showing price movement over time. No API key, no SDK, no build step. Just a URL with the ticker symbol and a few optional parameters.

Coverage spans stocks, cryptocurrencies, indices, commodities, and forex pairs, powered by data from London Strategic Edge. You can request timeframes from a single day up to five years, toggle between light and dark themes, and choose whether the area under the line gets a fill color. The output is an SVG that stays crisp at any size, which makes it useful for dashboards, documentation, blog posts, or README files where you want a quick visual without embedding a full chart library.

There's also a JSON endpoint that returns the same data in structured form, including the current quote, so you can build richer integrations if you need the numbers alongside the visual. Error handling is thoughtful: SVG requests stay embeddable even when something fails, with details tucked into the response headers so your page doesn't break. HTTP status codes are semantic, so you can cache aggressively when things succeed and back off when they don't.

The service is completely free. No API key required. The ask is that you cache responses and avoid hammering the endpoint, with IP-based rate limiting as the backstop for fair use. It's a deliberate tradeoff: simplicity over authentication overhead, which makes it ideal for quick embeds and lightweight integrations where you don't want to manage credentials.

If you've tried to add a tiny price chart to a static site or a GitHub README and bounced off the complexity of full charting libraries, this is the gap it fills. The output is clean, the integration is instant, and the price is right. It won't replace a trading terminal, but for a sparkline next to a headline or a quick visual in a status page, it does the job without ceremony.