6 Best APIs for Historical in Nigeria

Weatherbit API is a reliable, developer-friendly weather data service providing current weather conditions, 16-day daily forecasts, 120-hour hourly forecasts, historical weather, weather alerts, and air quality data for any location worldwide via a clean RESTful API. Weatherbit is widely respected for its data accuracy, comprehensive endpoint coverage, well-documented API reference, and competitive pricing that makes it accessible to Nigerian startups and developers who need more than the OpenWeatherMap free tier offers but cannot justify premium AccuWeather pricing. The 16-day daily forecast horizon is one of the longest among mid-tier weather APIs, making Weatherbit particularly useful for applications that need extended agricultural or event planning forecasts. Current weather data from Weatherbit includes temperature, apparent temperature, humidity, dew point, wind speed and direction, wind gust, sea-level pressure, precipitation, snowfall (globally), snow depth, cloud coverage, visibility, solar radiation, UV index, air quality index, and a detailed weather description code. The weather description code system maps to a comprehensive set of condition descriptions covering sunny, partly cloudy, overcast, various rain intensities (light, moderate, heavy, freezing), thunderstorm types, fog, and dust/sand conditions — the last of which is directly relevant to Nigerian Harmattan season when dust and sand from the Sahara reduces visibility across the country's northern and central regions. Hourly forecasting extends 120 hours (5 days) in advance with full hourly weather variables, enabling granular short-term planning for weather-sensitive Nigerian business operations. Construction site managers can check hour-by-hour rain probability before scheduling concrete pours. Event coordinators can assess whether weather will clear by the 6pm start of an outdoor concert. Agricultural drone operators can identify the optimal spray window between rain events by examining the 5-day hourly precipitation timeline. The 16-day daily forecast is Weatherbit's extended forecast offering, providing daily minimum and maximum temperature, precipitation probability and accumulation, wind speed and direction, humidity, UV index, sunrise/sunset times, and weather description for 16 days ahead. Nigerian farmers planning crop cycle activities — planting, fertilizer application, harvest scheduling — benefit from the 16-day horizon which aligns with the two-week planning cycles common in smallholder Nigerian agriculture. Air quality data is available through Weatherbit's Air Quality API endpoint, returning PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, CO, and O3 concentrations alongside AQI values derived from EPA standards. Nigerian environmental monitoring apps that also need weather data for context can combine Weatherbit's weather and air quality endpoints under a single API account, simplifying data source management. Weather alert notifications from Weatherbit cover severe weather warnings issued by official meteorological authorities. Nigerian alert platforms and emergency management apps can poll Weatherbit alerts for any Nigerian region and surface these official warnings to app users with appropriate geographic precision. Historical weather data from Weatherbit stretches back to 2010 with daily and hourly resolution, offering over a decade of Nigerian weather records for analysis. Nigerian agricultural research institutions, insurance actuaries calculating drought years, and climate analysts building weather-indexed products can use this historical archive. Weatherbit offers a free tier of 500 calls/day with access to current weather and 7-day forecasts. Paid plans start at $35/month for 50,000 daily calls with full access to all endpoints including historical data, 16-day forecasts, and weather alerts. Nigerian developers can start with the free tier and upgrade as usage grows.

CurrencyScoop is a foreign exchange data API that provides developers with real-time and historical exchange rate data for over 168 currencies worldwide, including the Nigerian Naira. Built for fintech developers, e-commerce platforms, and financial applications, CurrencyScoop delivers accurate, up-to-date rates through a simple RESTful API with clear documentation and reliable uptime. The API provides several core endpoints suited to different integration scenarios. The latest rates endpoint returns current exchange rates for all supported currencies relative to a specified base currency, updated throughout the trading day to reflect market movements. This endpoint is the foundation for currency conversion features in payment processors, e-commerce storefronts, and financial calculators. The convert endpoint accepts an amount and currency pair and returns the converted value directly, simplifying client-side implementation for applications that only need conversion functionality rather than rate tables. Historical rates represent one of CurrencyScoop's strongest features. Developers can query exchange rates for any past date going back years, enabling applications that need to calculate the Naira value of historical transactions, compare current rates against past periods, or build time-series visualizations of currency movements. Nigerian accounting and invoicing platforms can use historical rates to accurately record the Naira value of foreign currency transactions at the time they occurred. The time-series endpoint enables querying rates across a date range, returning a day-by-day series of exchange rates. This powers trend charts and analytics features showing how the Naira has moved against major trading currencies like the USD, EUR, GBP, and CNY over weeks, months, or years. For Nigerian financial analysts and import businesses tracking their currency exposure, these trend charts provide valuable context for hedging and procurement timing decisions. Nigerian Naira is fully supported across all CurrencyScoop endpoints, reflecting the service's coverage of all globally traded and many exotic currencies. For Nigerian payment companies, remittance platforms, and e-commerce businesses serving both local and international customers, having accurate NGN rates is non-negotiable. CurrencyScoop sources rates from financial data providers that cover African currencies, ensuring NGN rates reflect current market conditions rather than stale approximations. For e-commerce platforms serving Nigerian consumers who prefer to see prices in familiar Naira terms, CurrencyScoop enables real-time price conversion from USD or EUR product prices to NGN. Given the volatility of the Naira exchange rate in recent years, real-time rates are significantly more accurate than rates hardcoded into the application. This ensures customers always see accurate Naira prices that reflect actual conversion rates they would experience at checkout. Remittance and international money transfer platforms operating in Nigeria use currency APIs like CurrencyScoop to display indicative exchange rates and calculate how much Naira a recipient will receive for a given foreign currency amount. Transparency in exchange rate display is increasingly important for Nigerian remittance customers who compare services based on the rates and fees displayed before initiating a transfer. The API is available through a freemium model with a free plan offering enough requests for development and low-traffic applications. Paid plans scale with request volume to accommodate production applications handling thousands of conversions daily. All plans include access to the same data quality and endpoints; higher tiers simply remove request limits and unlock faster support response times. Integration is designed to be developer-friendly with straightforward authentication using an API key included in request headers or query parameters. The JSON response format is consistent across endpoints, and the documentation includes examples in multiple programming languages. Nigerian developers can typically integrate CurrencyScoop into an existing application in under an hour, making it one of the fastest paths to reliable FX data.

Open Exchange Rates is one of the most widely deployed foreign exchange rate APIs in the world, used by thousands of applications ranging from e-commerce platforms and accounting software to fintech apps and content management systems. The service provides clean, reliable JSON exchange rate data for over 200 currencies, with rates updated hourly on the free tier and in real time on paid plans. Historical data going back to 2001 is available for all supported currencies, making it one of the deepest historical forex datasets accessible through a simple API. For Nigerian developers building currency-aware applications, Open Exchange Rates provides dependable NGN rate data alongside every other major world currency. Nigeria's currency situation makes exchange rate data critically important for application developers. The Nigerian Naira (NGN) has experienced significant depreciation against the US Dollar and other hard currencies over the past decade, driven by oil price volatility, foreign exchange policy changes, and structural economic factors. Nigerian applications that deal with foreign currencies — e-commerce platforms, accounting tools, remittance services, salary calculation apps for multinational employees, and investment platforms — all need accurate, regularly updated exchange rate data to function correctly. The /latest.json endpoint is the most commonly used endpoint, returning current exchange rates for all 200+ currencies from the specified base currency. On the free plan, only USD is available as the base currency — meaning all rates are expressed as units of currency per 1 USD. The USD/NGN rate is available on the free plan. For Nigerian applications that need NGN as the base currency (showing how much USD, EUR, or GBP costs in naira terms), the Starter plan ($12/month) enables any base currency. For most Nigerian applications, the USD-base approach with client-side inversion is functionally equivalent. Historical rates are available via /historical/{YYYY-MM-DD}.json, returning exchange rates as they were on any past date. This capability is essential for Nigerian accounting software and ERP systems that need to record foreign currency transactions at the exchange rate on the transaction date — a requirement under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and a common requirement in Nigerian corporate accounting practice. With rates available back to 2001, Nigerian finance teams can reconstruct historical exchange rate data for any period their records cover. The /convert endpoint performs currency conversion: specify an amount, a from-currency, and a to-currency, and receive the converted amount at the current rate. For Nigerian e-commerce platforms that display product prices in multiple currencies, this endpoint handles the arithmetic server-side without the developer needing to fetch rates and calculate manually. The /time-series endpoint returns exchange rate data over a date range, ideal for building trend charts and calculating average rates over periods. A Nigerian corporate treasurer tracking the average USD/NGN rate over each quarter, or a Nigerian researcher analyzing the correlation between naira depreciation and inflation, can use time-series data directly without downloading and processing historical files. Open Exchange Rates also provides OHLCV (open, high, low, close, volume) daily rate data for currency pairs — useful for Nigerian forex analytics tools that need to display candlestick charts or calculate volatility metrics for currency pairs. The free plan provides 1,000 API requests per month with hourly rate updates — sufficient for a low-traffic application or prototype. The Starter plan ($12/month) provides 10,000 requests per month, unlocks any base currency, and removes the USD-only restriction. The Production plan ($97/month) provides real-time rate updates and 100,000 requests per month, appropriate for high-traffic Nigerian fintech applications. All plans use a simple app_id API key parameter with no request signing, making integration extremely quick.

CurrencyFreaks is a foreign exchange rate API providing real-time and historical currency data for over 150 global currencies, with particular value for Nigerian developers and businesses needing reliable Naira exchange rate data. The service aggregates rates from multiple financial data sources to deliver accurate mid-market rates with consistent uptime, making it a dependable choice for fintech applications, payment systems, and currency-aware business software. The API delivers current exchange rates across all supported currency pairs, with rates refreshed regularly throughout the trading day to track market movements. For applications where currency rate freshness matters — such as payment processing, order pricing, or customer-facing currency displays — CurrencyFreaks provides the up-to-date data needed to reflect actual market conditions rather than stale approximations. The Nigerian Naira is among the supported currencies, ensuring NGN/USD, NGN/EUR, NGN/GBP, and other critical Naira pairs are available for Nigerian applications. Historical exchange rate data is available from 2000 onwards, giving developers access to over two decades of FX rate history. This extensive archive is valuable for multiple use cases: financial modeling that requires long-term currency trend analysis, accounting systems that need to reconstruct historical transaction values at the exchange rates prevailing at the time of each transaction, and research applications analyzing the relationship between currency movements and economic events in Nigeria and globally. The historical depth is particularly significant for Nigerian context. The Naira has experienced several major devaluation episodes since 2000, including the 2016 exchange rate liberalization, the 2023 unification of official and parallel market rates, and subsequent volatility. Applications built for Nigerian financial analysis, research, or compliance can access the complete historical rate record through CurrencyFreaks to accurately model and document the impact of these exchange rate changes on business performance or asset values. Currency conversion is directly supported through a dedicated convert endpoint. Rather than retrieving raw rates and performing conversion on the client side, applications can submit a source currency, target currency, and amount and receive back the converted value. This simplifies integration for applications where only conversion functionality is needed, such as product pricing widgets, invoice currency selectors, or quick calculator features. For Nigerian e-commerce platforms running multicurrency storefronts, CurrencyFreaks enables automatic price adjustment in multiple currencies based on live rates. When a Nigerian business displays prices in USD for international customers or in GBP for diaspora buyers, using live rates ensures the foreign currency price accurately reflects the current Naira equivalent, protecting the business from pricing errors due to rate movements. Remittance service providers and mobile money platforms operating in Nigeria rely on accurate FX data to calculate and display the Naira amount recipients will receive. Compliance and transparency requirements in the Nigerian financial services sector mean that displayed rates must be accurate and traceable. CurrencyFreaks provides the rate data foundation while applications handle the display and audit trail requirements. The API uses simple API key authentication included in request query parameters or headers. The JSON response format is clean and consistent, with currency codes following ISO 4217 standards for interoperability. The free plan provides 1,000 monthly requests — sufficient for development, testing, and low-traffic applications — while paid plans scale up request limits to accommodate production workloads. Nigerian developers benefit from a straightforward onboarding process requiring only email registration to obtain a working API key.