title: How Safe Is It To Scrape Stock-Price Information
body: <p>As far as I can see, there are no developer-API services for stock-price information with the following stipulations:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Free or low-monthly cost (
  <li>Ability to ship code which uses the service to multiple parties (e.g. an iPhone app)</li>
  <li>No per-transaction/lookup cost</li>
  <li>No limit on number of lookups or transactions</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So I find that I am forced to look at scraping. It seems that the easiest thing to 'scrape' is Yahoo's CSV service which was linked to elsewhere on StackOverflow:</p>
  
  <p>E.g.: <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=msft&amp;f=price" rel="noreferrer">http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=msft&amp;f=price</a></p>
  
  <p>That's actually very easy to parse. But I wonder how fragile this is, clearly if Yahoo removes this service, or changes things, or limits the number of lookups severely, then the clients I build could be affected.</p>
  
  <p>How would others approach this problem, or is it simply a case that the data is too valuable and that it's not available at my price? I have searched for a fairly reliable, 20-min delayed service, but simply can't find one that looks as though it will still be around in 6 months.</p>
  
  <p>Any advice much appreciated.</p>