Best Astrology APIs for Developers: 2026 Buyer Guide

Choosing an astrology API is a structural decision, not a line item. Pick a single-tradition provider and you may stitch three vendors, three auth schemes, and three bills the day you add tarot. Pick a credit wallet and your bill moves with whichever endpoints your users hit. This guide answers the buying question first, then shows the working. Every competitor number was re-checked live in September 2026.

Which provider should you choose

There is no single best astrology API, only a best fit, and each option below wins somewhere.

Choose RoxyAPI when you serve a global or Western-first audience, need several insight domains under one key (Western and Vedic astrology plus forecast, human design, chinese astrology, feng shui, numerology, tarot, Ayurveda, dreams, or I-Ching), you want an editorial-grade reading and the evidence behind each verdict rather than raw numbers, flat per-request pricing with no credit math, remote per-domain MCP on one key for hosted AI agents, a public accuracy benchmark to audit before signing, or to ship fast with typed SDKs, drop-in UI components, copy-paste widgets, and MIT templates you white-label.

What RoxyAPI does not cover, stated plainly. Three specialisms sit outside the catalog: classical Vedic sub-systems such as Lal Kitab and Varshaphal, palmistry from a hand photo, and regional South Asian calendars in Tamil, Malayalam, and Telugu with prebuilt PDF reports. If yours is built around one, price any wallet at your real call volume.

Build it yourself when you need exactly one domain, have in-house astrology and ephemeris expertise, and can take on the licensing question. For breadth, cross-domain consistency, and verified accuracy, that build is months, not a weekend.

Ready to evaluate live? RoxyAPI covers 18+ domains on one key. See pricing.

What makes an astrology API production grade in 2026

A production-grade astrology API turns a date, time, and place into structured output, with the reading attached: positions, houses, aspects, dashas, compatibility scores, horoscopes. The differentiators sit on six axes; score every candidate against all six.

• Platform: how many insight domains one key covers, whether one request returns a complete result, and whether a new domain arrives in the plan or on a new invoice.
• Simple surface, advanced core: whether the depth lives inside the engine or inside your integration, and whether domains compose or merely coexist.
• AI agent readiness: whether the MCP server is remote Streamable HTTP, reachable by any hosted platform, or local stdio, laptop-only, and whether you keep your own model and prompt.
• Verification: position math validated against a reference such as NASA JPL Horizons, a published methodology, and a runnable benchmark.
• Developer experience: typed SDKs, a live playground returning real production responses, drop-in UI components, embeddable widgets, templates, and interpretations localized past field labels.
• Licensing and privacy: which calculation engine sits underneath, because a Swiss Ephemeris dependency carries AGPL copyleft that can reach a network service.

How RoxyAPI, AstrologyAPI, and Prokerala compare

Three providers are public, self-serve, and broad enough to shortlist. Others (single-tradition Vedic specialists, free-tier hobby projects, regional calculators) cover one tradition or gate breadth behind separate products. The table follows the six axes above, every cell read from the live site of each provider in September 2026.

The honest read: those endpoint totals are not measuring the same thing. An astrology-only catalog reaches a high count by listing each report type as its own API, so on a credit wallet one chart can draw several separately billed calls, while RoxyAPI returns it whole in one. AstrologyAPI lists birth chart, kundli, horoscopes, transits, progressions, KP, and Lalkitab separately, Prokerala lists per-feature credit items, but most are facets of one tradition. RoxyAPI groups them: its Western and Vedic domains already include birth charts, kundli, panchang, dasha, KP sub-lords, transits, synastry, and Guna Milan. The count of 18 is eighteen distinct systems, not one astrology surface split into many.

RoxyAPI is built global-first and still carries its own Vedic depth on the same key: KP sub-lords and sub-sub-lords, Vimshottari dasha, panchang, dosha checks, navamsa, ashtakavarga, shadbala, 36-point Guna Milan, plus the full advanced Western layer.

Which domains does one RoxyAPI key actually cover

Eighteen, and the honest way to read that is one row at a time. Each is a distinct system with its own endpoints, not a facet of astrology counted twice, all included on every plan at no extra cost. The endpoint figures are floors read from the live public spec.

Do not take that on trust. Count it yourself, and run the same check on every vendor you shortlist:

curl -s https://roxyapi.com/api/v2/openapi.json \
  | jq '{domains: ([.tags[].name] - ["Usage","Languages"] | length), endpoints: (.paths | length)}'
# -> { "domains": 18, "endpoints": 258 }

No key, no signup. A vendor with no spec to count is asking you to grade a marketing table.

What do the readings actually contain

Interpretation text, not only numbers, the axis no domain count can show. Every calculation endpoint returns the reading beside the geometry: an interpretation summary on each natal aspect, a reading on each detected pattern, the dynamics behind a synastry score, and on a Vedic kundli each yoga with its result paragraph plus an evidence field naming the placement that triggered it.

{
  "interpretationKey": "aspectPattern.tSquare",
  "interpretation": "T-Square focused on Moon in Aries, tension between Sun and Saturn demands resolution at the apex, the primary growth engine of the chart."
}

The editorial-grade test: a verdict a practitioner can be shown the reason for, not a label taken on faith.

The horoscopes are columnist grade rather than a rotating fortune. Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly are long-form columns computed from the live transits for that sign and date, read into whole-sign houses, so all twelve signs differ every day instead of eleven sharing one fallback. Each ships its sky events underneath: the bodies, the angle, the house for that sign, the exact instant to the second, and the window it holds open, so an editor can check a column against NASA JPL Horizons before it runs. No language model sits in that path, so the same sign and period returns the same column every call, and a piece scheduled months ahead is the one that publishes. Method: the unique forecasts per sign writeup.

The newest domains carry the printed source beside the verdict: Vastu names the text, chapter, and verse behind each judgement, Ayurveda the classical factor behind every value, Kabbalah every candidate Hebrew spelling with the rule that chose one, and Mesoamerican astrology the correlation behind the day sign.

Why MCP transport matters more than MCP presence

By 2026 several providers ship something MCP-shaped, so the question is not whether a provider has MCP but which transport. Remote Streamable HTTP is a hosted endpoint any agent reaches with a URL and a key. Local stdio is a process the developer installs and runs, out of reach of hosted automation platforms.

Two of the three ship remote MCP. RoxyAPI exposes one MCP tool per endpoint, so the count tracks the full API at 255+ tools across one hosted server per domain: 18 of them, 39 astrology tools at /mcp/astrology, 55 Vedic at /mcp/vedic-astrology, 10 tarot at /mcp/tarot, and so on, plus a keyless docs server, all on the same X-API-Key as REST, with tool discovery free of quota. AstrologyAPI runs a single Remote MCP endpoint exposing 109 tools across Vedic and Western systems, on a custom header. Prokerala lists no MCP server on its developer site as of September 2026. Several unnamed single-tradition vendors ship local stdio wrappers, fine for a personal Cursor session but not a hosted agent.

One config entry, and the same URL works from Claude Code, Claude Desktop, the Claude Messages API, Cursor, VS Code with GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, the OpenAI Agents SDK, Antigravity, n8n, Make, Zapier, and Dify:

const tarot = await createMCPClient({
  transport: {
    type: 'http',
    url: 'https://roxyapi.com/mcp/tarot',
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ROXY_API_KEY}` },
  },
});

The agent sends tools/list, gets typed input schemas and enum values back, calls what it needs, and grounds its answer in the result instead of inventing one. Pass compact: true and the response returns in a lossless columnar shape naming each field once rather than per row, cutting tokens per turn while one request still counts as one. Full setup: the RoxyAPI MCP guide.

How fast can you get a reading on screen

Fast, because you do not draw the chart. The response carries the geometry, so the visual layer is a component you drop in, not a project. RoxyAPI ships 70 MIT licensed components in @roxyapi/ui that render a natal wheel, kundli, bodygraph, or tarot spread from the endpoint response, for React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, plain HTML, and WordPress. Three paths, all included on every plan.

1. A framework app. Install the package, keep the secret key server side, pass the response in as a prop.
2. Any site that takes HTML. Paste one snippet with a browser-safe publishable key and the widget fetches its own data and renders its own inputs, no backend, no build step. There are 67, plus a hosted embed URL for surfaces that cannot run scripts.
3. A chatbot. Map the MCP tool name your model called to the component that draws its result; the AI chat widgets tutorial walks it in about fifteen minutes.

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@roxyapi/ui@latest/dist/cdn/widgets.js" defer></script>
<div data-roxy-widget="natal-chart" data-publishable-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY"></div>

Under all three sit typed SDKs generated from the spec for TypeScript, Python, PHP, C#, and Go, plus a WordPress plugin with Gutenberg blocks and shortcodes, so a new endpoint appears in autocomplete with no hand-written client.

What each provider actually costs

Two use credit wallets, one flat per-request billing. What matters is the cost to cover every domain you need at your volume.

RoxyAPI flat tiers, every domain on every plan, 1 request equals 1 unit:

Adding a domain does not change the bill. Effective per-request cost falls about 11.2x from Starter to Enterprise, and annual billing lowers it further (Starter $389/yr, Professional $1,489/yr). Spread $389 over twelve months and 18 domains: about $1.80 per domain per month, $2.17 monthly, against $12 and up for a single-domain API. It is a floor, since a new domain joins the same subscription.

The wallets differ. AstrologyAPI: one unified credit wallet across every API (Indian, Western, Horoscope, AI, PDF), 150 free credits on signup, credits that do not expire, volume bands lowering the per-credit rate, plus monthly suite subscriptions priced per tradition, so an app spanning Indian and Western astrology is quoted two, PDF reports per report. Prokerala: a forever-free tier plus a wallet where credits reset monthly and do not carry forward, basic Panchang 10 credits, birth chart 50, Mangal Dosha check 30, full Kundli 50 to 300, daily horoscope 250, regional calendar 2,000. Auth: a single X-API-Key header on RoxyAPI, HTTP Basic with a userId and apiKey pair on AstrologyAPI (both re-verified September 2026).

Convert to dollars. Prokerala publishes 100,000 credits for 2,500 rupees, exclusive of GST, three months validity (re-verified September 2026). At a rate of 95 that is $26.32, so one credit is roughly $0.000263 against the flat Starter rate of $0.00078:

Read the right-hand column: about 84x a flat plan for the daily horoscope, the highest-frequency call in a consumer app, 675x for a regional calendar. Run 50,000 daily horoscopes, the volume $39 Starter includes, and the wallet costs roughly $3,290. These are published basic-report rates checked September 2026; the advanced variant draws several times more (Panchang 10 basic, 100 advanced), and rates move.

Expiry differs: Prokerala plan credits do not carry forward and its top-ups expire in three months, so unused capacity is lost, while AstrologyAPI states its wallet credits never expire. Either way the models bill different things: how many users you have, versus which endpoints they like.

Accuracy is a public claim or it is marketing

Astrology APIs claim accuracy constantly; few publish a benchmark you can audit. RoxyAPI is the one of the three with a public MIT-licensed repository you can clone and run before signing up, checking positions against NASA JPL Horizons DE441. Behind it run 11,000+ automated tests on every deploy, 2,800+ of them gold standard tests locked to named external references rather than to another astrology library, so a drift fails the build before it ships. The other two publish no reproducible benchmark, which does not mean their math is wrong, only that you cannot verify it. The gold-standard tests writeup has the methodology.

The licensing question almost nobody asks

Ask every vendor one question, in writing: which calculation engine runs underneath, and if it is Swiss Ephemeris, do you hold a commercial license?

Swiss Ephemeris, what the previous generation of astrology software was built on, is dual licensed: buy a commercial license from its authors, or take it under the AGPL, whose copyleft triggers on network access rather than distribution. Google says so in its own policy: AGPL-licensed code "MUST NOT be used at Google", because a product or service reachable "over a remote network interface" can be required to release "the complete corresponding source code of the product or service ... to the world under the AGPL license", and "the risks heavily outweigh the benefits" (Google Open Source, AGPL policy).

An astrology API is a network service, so an AGPL engine without a commercial license pushes exposure downstream to your application. Neither credit-wallet provider here publishes which engine it runs (checked September 2026), which is the point rather than an accusation: you cannot audit what is undisclosed.

When a provider IS open source you can check in sixty seconds, and this is the trap most buyers walk into: open the package manifest and look for swisseph or pyswisseph in Python, SwissEphNet in .NET, sweph or a vendored libswe in C or Node. A permissive license on the wrapper does not launder the license of the engine underneath. The badge describes the wrapper, the dependency list the engine.

RoxyAPI removes the question: Roxy Ephemeris is a custom engine verified against NASA JPL Horizons, with no AGPL, no copyleft, and no per-user royalty (/policy/license).

How to make your first call with location first

Every coordinate-dependent endpoint (natal chart, horoscope, panchang, dasha, synastry, compatibility) needs latitude, longitude, and timezone, so resolve the birth city first and feed those into the chart endpoint. Users never type coordinates.

# 1. Resolve the birth city to coordinates and an IANA timezone
curl -s "https://roxyapi.com/api/v2/location/search?q=Mumbai" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY"
# -> cities[0] = { latitude, longitude, timezone: "Asia/Kolkata", ... }

# 2. Generate the natal chart with those coordinates
curl -s -X POST "https://roxyapi.com/api/v2/astrology/natal-chart" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"date":"1990-07-15","time":"08:30:00","latitude":19.0760,"longitude":72.8777,"timezone":"Asia/Kolkata"}'

The response returns planets, houses, aspects, ascendant, midheaven, and a summary. The rest is in the quickstart, and every request and response shape is in the API reference, which runs live in the browser with no signup or key required.

FAQ

What is the best astrology API for developers in 2026? RoxyAPI: 18+ insight domains and 258+ endpoints on one key, editorial-grade interpretations rather than bare numbers, flat per-request pricing, Remote MCP, typed SDKs in five languages plus a WordPress plugin, drop-in UI components and widgets, and the only public MIT-licensed benchmark of the three.

Which astrology API supports both Vedic and Western astrology? RoxyAPI ships both as two of its 18+ domains on one key, with KP sub-lords, dasha, panchang, synastry, and 36-point Guna Milan; the same key adds forecast, human design, chinese astrology, feng shui, tarot, numerology, dreams, and nine more.

Is there an astrology API with tarot and numerology in one bundle? Yes. One RoxyAPI key covers all 18+ domains at flat per-request pricing, tarot and numerology among them, alongside Western and Vedic astrology, forecast, human design, chinese astrology, feng shui, Ayurveda, I-Ching, and dreams.

Do astrology APIs return interpretations, or only numbers? It varies, and writing the copy yourself is the hidden cost. RoxyAPI returns an interpretation summary on every aspect, a reading on each detected chart pattern, and on the Vedic side a yoga verdict carrying the evidence that triggered it.

Does having MCP make a provider AI-ready, or does the transport matter? The transport matters: remote Streamable HTTP works on hosted platforms, local stdio only on a laptop. RoxyAPI ships 18 remote per-domain MCP servers, one tool per endpoint (255+ tools) plus a keyless docs server, all on the REST key.

How much does an astrology API cost for a startup? Flat per-request pricing is the most predictable. RoxyAPI Starter is $39 a month for 50,000 requests across all 18+ domains, about $1.80 per domain per month on annual billing, and the bill never moves with your endpoint mix.

Can an astrology API create AGPL liability for my app? It can. Swiss Ephemeris is dual licensed, a paid commercial license or the AGPL, whose copyleft triggers on network access rather than distribution, which is why Google bans AGPL code company-wide. RoxyAPI runs Roxy Ephemeris, with no AGPL in the calculation path (/policy/license).

Do I have to build the chart UI myself? No. @roxyapi/ui ships 70 MIT licensed components that render a natal wheel, kundli, bodygraph, or tarot spread from the endpoint response, and 67 copy-paste widgets do the same on a publishable key. The AI chat widgets tutorial covers chatbots.

Conclusion

This market in 2026 is a fit decision, not a ranking. AstrologyAPI and Prokerala are astrology-led, credit-wallet providers built for the South Asian market. RoxyAPI covers 18+ domains on one key, returns editorial-grade interpretations with the evidence attached, and alone of the three has flat per-request pricing, a runnable public accuracy benchmark, typed SDKs, drop-in UI components, and Remote MCP. Explore the product catalog, check pricing, or run live calls in the API reference.