The data is free. The service around it is what we sell.
Every figure on this site is published under CC BY 4.0 — free to use, including commercially, as long as you attribute it. That is not changing. What businesses pay for is everything that sits around the data: a rate limit that fits production traffic, an uptime commitment, attribution waived for in-product use, and someone to email when a number looks wrong.
01 Free — CC BY 4.0
For education, journalism, research, personal projects, and any use where a visible credit is fine. No account, no key, no rate limit published.
- Everything on this site — 137 sovereigns plus world and EU aggregates
- Full REST API — /api/debt, /api/compare, /api/rank, /api/search
- Reproducible citations — /api/debt/snapshot?c={id}&t={iso} returns an immutable, timestamped value you can cite and re-verify
- Bulk dataset — /data/debt.json, the same file that drives every counter
- MCP endpoint for AI agents — /mcp
- Embeddable counter — free for editorial and non-commercial use, keeping the attribution link
- Condition: credit “Global Debt Clock” with a link back to global-debt-clock.com
If that works for you, take it — there is nothing to buy and nothing to sign.
02 Commercial — from $99/month
For products that embed the data where a visible credit is impractical, or where you need the service to behave like infrastructure.
- Attribution waived — use the figures and the widget in-product without the visible credit line
- Committed rate limits suited to production traffic, agreed in writing
- Uptime commitment and advance notice of any breaking API change
- Email support from the person who maintains the dataset
- Change notifications — told in advance when baselines are re-based, so your figures never move without warning
Pricing depends on volume and how the data is used. Most single-product uses land at the entry tier.
Enquire about a commercial licence03 Enterprise & bulk — custom
For higher-volume or non-standard needs where the public endpoints are not the right shape.
- Historical and bulk exports in the format you need (CSV, Parquet, scheduled drops)
- Custom country sets or derived measures built to your definition
- Private feeds — a dedicated endpoint rather than the shared public one
- Formal agreements — invoicing, DPA, security review, procurement paperwork
- Methodology consultation — direct access when you need to defend a figure internally
04 What you are actually buying
Worth being blunt, because it affects whether this is right for you.
- The underlying source data is public. These figures derive from the IMF World Economic Outlook, which anyone can download for nothing. We are not reselling access to something scarce.
- What is scarce is the packaging. 137 sovereigns normalised to one basis, per-country provenance, an implied exchange rate consistent with the source rather than applied by us, reproducible timestamped snapshots, and a documented record of every revision.
- And the maintenance. Baselines are reviewed quarterly against each new IMF release, discrepancies are chased, and every change is logged on the revisions page.
- These are modelled estimates, not official government accounting totals and not a real-time feed from any treasury. Full detail on the methodology page. If your use requires certified figures, buy them from the issuing authority instead.
05 Try it before you ask
Every endpoint below is live and free right now. Evaluate against the real thing rather than a sales call.
Specs: OpenAPI · llms.txt · press & media resources
06 Get in touch
Tell us what you are building, roughly what volume you expect, and whether attribution is a problem for you. That is usually enough to quote against. Email [email protected].