Rent estimate APIs, and what they actually cost to run
There are plenty of lists of rental data APIs. Most are written from documentation. This one is written from a bill — we pay for one of these every month and have metered what it costs, which turns out to be the part the pricing pages do not tell you.
Disclosure
PacRent runs on RentCast. We pay for the Foundation plan every month, and the operating figures on this page come from our own metered usage. We are not affiliated with HouseCanary, ATTOM or Zillow Group, and none of the four has reviewed this page.
Displaying Zillow's own data in a product, where the brand matters.
What it costs to actually run one
Four things we learned paying for one of these in production. None of them is on a pricing page, and the first is the one that breaks budgets.
01
An address lookup is not one request
A single property analysis in our app touches five endpoints — rent AVM, value AVM, property record, sale listings, market stats — and measures at about 4.65 requests on live data. We budget it at 5 as a ceiling so a user always gets at least the number of searches advertised. On the Foundation plan's 1,000 a month that is roughly 200 analyses, for every user combined.
Source: RENTCAST_CALLS_PER_SEARCH and the measurement beside it, apps/web/src/lib/subscription.ts
02
Background jobs spend the same quota as users
Refreshing 50 city market pages at four zip codes each is 200 requests a month before anyone visits the site. A fifth of the plan, consumed by a cron job.
Meter per request, or your own numbers will lie to you
We logged one usage event per city refreshed while actually making one request per zip. The meter read 118 calls for a month in which roughly 450 had been spent — a quarter of the truth, on the figure a quota guard was sizing batches from.
Source: Measured 10 Nov 2026; fixed in packages/ui and lib/market-data.ts
04
The licence decides the architecture, not the price
RentCast permits storing and redistributing the data; Bridge forbids storing it at all. That one difference decides whether you can build a monthly snapshot table or must call live on every page view — and it is not on either pricing page.
Source: rentcast.io/terms-api and bridgeinteractive.com, read 11 Nov 2026
Provider by provider
Every figure below is quoted from the provider’s own page with the date it was read. Prices move — check theirs before deciding anything.
RentCast
Rental-first work: rent estimates, rental comps and market stats by zip. The cheapest honest entry point, and the only one of the four that publishes every rate.
RentCast pricing tiers
Tier
Monthly
Included
Beyond that
Developer
$0
50 requests/month
$0.20/request
Foundation
$74
1,000 requests/month
$0.06/request
Growth
$199
5,000 requests/month
$0.03/request
Scale
$449
25,000 requests/month
$0.015/request
Quoted from RentCast, read November 11, 2026: “Developer $0 / 50 requests per month / $0.20 per request; Foundation $74 / 1,000 / $0.06; Growth $199 / 5,000 / $0.03; Scale $449 / 25,000 / $0.015”
Licence terms that matter
“to sublicense, disclose, display, resell and distribute the API Data to third parties” — RentCast terms, read November 11, 2026
“knowingly allow unauthorized parties to scrape or otherwise unlawfully obtain the API Data through any of your applications” — RentCast terms, read November 11, 2026
Coverage, their words: “150+ million residential and commercial properties; 38k+ zip codes; 500k property records updated every day” — RentCast, read November 11, 2026
The catch
The quota is counted per REQUEST, not per thing you look up. One address can be several requests and a background refresh job can eat a month's allowance without a single user action. Budget by request, not by feature.
HouseCanary
Valuation-led products. Built around AVMs and analytics rather than a rent lookup, and priced accordingly.
HouseCanary pricing tiers
Tier
Monthly
Included
Beyond that
Basic
$19
see per-call rates
—
Pro
$79
see per-call rates
Basic endpoints $0.50/call
Teams
$199
see per-call rates
Basic endpoints $0.40/call
Enterprise
Custom
see per-call rates
Basic endpoints $0.30/call
Quoted from HouseCanary, read November 11, 2026: “Basic $19/month, Pro $79/month, Teams $199/month, Enterprise custom. Property Analytics API per successful call — Basic endpoints $0.50 (Pro) / $0.40 (Teams) / $0.30 (Enterprise); Premium $4.00 / $3.00 / $2.50; Premium Plus $6.00 / $5.00 / $4.00”
The catch
The subscription is not the cost — successful calls are billed on top, and the premium endpoints are 8x to 12x the basic ones. A rental-specific AVM price is not published on the pricing page at all, so rent work needs a quote before you can model it.
ATTOM
Breadth of property facts — tax, deed, sales history — rather than a focused rent number. A different job from the other three.
Quoted from ATTOM, read November 11, 2026: “Basic Property — Starting at $500/month. Premium Property — Contact us for Pricing. Basic Property API plans start at $500 per month, while Premium Property API pricing is tailored to more comprehensive data and usage requirements.”
Coverage, their words: “This table highlights major data categories available within each option. Individual endpoint availability and data coverage may vary by license.” — ATTOM, read November 11, 2026
The catch
The $500 floor does not buy rent estimates. Reading ATTOM's own comparison table, “ATTOM AVM & Valuation Data” and “AVM History, Home Equity & Rental AVM” are both Premium-only, and Premium is quote-on-request. So the cheapest ATTOM tier that does the job this page is about has no published price at all — and the published one is roughly seven times RentCast's.
Zillow (via Bridge Interactive)
Displaying Zillow's own data in a product, where the brand matters. Not a general-purpose data source.
Pricing is not published
Access is granted per application, not purchased, and no price is published anywhere we or a signed-in user could reach. Registering at bridgedataoutput.com and working through API Access → Request Data Access → Zillow Group Datasets surfaces a dataset list and terms to accept — no pricing. Applications are reported to take 10+ days.
Checked bridgedataoutput.com (registered account, 11 Nov 2026), bridgeinteractive.com on November 11, 2026.
Licence terms that matter
“Users may only use the API to retrieve and display dynamic content from Zillow and are not permitted to store information locally.” — Zillow (via Bridge Interactive) terms, reported November 11, 2026 (their site blocks automated reading — quoted from coverage, not read first-hand)
“After an application and use case are reviewed, users will be issued a maximum of 1,000 calls per day per data set.” — Zillow (via Bridge Interactive) terms, read November 11, 2026
The catch
No local storage, and no price to evaluate. The storage clause rules out most of what people want an estimates API for — you cannot cache a result, trend it over time, or recompute last month's figure, so every view is a live call against a daily cap. And since nothing is priced until you are approved, you cannot cost a build before committing 10+ days to an application. If what you actually want is rent data rather than Zillow's brand on it, see the free option below.
Before you buy anything
Zillow Research data (ZORI) is free, and may be all you need
Zillow publishes the Zillow Observed Rent Index as free CSV downloads. No API key, no application, no per-request cost — you pick a metric, a geography and a data type, and download a file.
The distinction that decides whether you need to pay anyone: a per-address estimate needs a paid API. A market rent index does not — it is a published file.
Where it will not do
It is a market index, not an address lookup. It will not tell you what one house should rent for.
Rent coverage is thinner than home-value coverage — it is an asking-rent index concentrated where rental listings are dense, so rural and thin markets may be missing entirely.
It is a file, not a feed. Refreshing means re-downloading on their schedule, not calling an endpoint when you need a number.
“ZORI is a repeat-rent index weighted to the rental housing stock, computed as the mean of listed rents in the 40th to 60th percentile range for a region, smoothed and seasonally adjusted.” — reported November 11, 2026; Zillow blocks automated reading, so confirm on the page before relying on it
“Published at national, state, metro, county, city, neighborhood and zip code level, with zip coverage materially narrower than the home value index.” — reported November 11, 2026; Zillow blocks automated reading, so confirm on the page before relying on it
“Free for public use with attribution to Zillow Group, and you may not imply a relationship with Zillow.” — reported November 11, 2026; Zillow blocks automated reading, so confirm on the page before relying on it
Choosing by the job
If rent is the answer you need — RentCast is the only one of the four priced like a utility, and the only one you can evaluate without talking to anyone.
If valuation is the product — HouseCanary is built for AVM work, but the subscription is not the cost. Successful calls are billed on top, and premium endpoints run eight to twelve times the basic ones.
If you need property facts, not a rent number — ATTOM is a different job: tax, deed and sales history at breadth, from $500 a month. Worth knowing before you budget that rent estimates are not in that tier — AVM and Rental AVM sit in Premium, which is quote-on-request.
If the Zillow brand matters — Bridge is the only route, it is application-gated with no published price, and the no-local-storage clause decides your architecture before you write a line. If you want Zillow’s rent data rather than Zillow’s name, the free research download above is the shorter path.
You probably do not need an API
If you are not building software — you want rent estimates for a handful of addresses — an API is the wrong tool. You would be paying a monthly minimum and writing code to answer a question a web page can answer.
A paid HTTP interface that returns an estimated market rent for an address, usually alongside comparable listings and market statistics. You send an address, you get a number and the comparables behind it. It is the same class of estimate a Rent Zestimate represents, sold programmatically.
Which rent estimate API is cheapest?
RentCast publishes the lowest entry pricing of the four here — a free Developer tier at 50 requests a month, then $74 a month for 1,000. ATTOM's Basic tier starts at $500 a month and does not include rent estimates at all; those sit in Premium, which is quote-on-request. But cheapest per request is not cheapest in practice, because the number of requests one lookup costs varies enormously by provider and by how much of the answer you need.
Can I use Zillow's API for rent estimates?
Not in the way most people mean. The legacy self-register Zillow API is no longer having call volumes adjusted, and access now runs through Bridge Interactive after a use-case review. Bridge's terms also forbid storing the data locally, which rules out caching, trending or recomputing — every view has to be a live call against a daily cap.
How many API calls does one property analysis cost?
More than one, and this is the thing that breaks budgets. In our own product a single analysis touches five endpoints and measures at about 4.65 requests on live data. A plan sold as 1,000 requests a month is therefore roughly 200 analyses, across every user combined.
Do I need an API if I just want rent estimates for my own properties?
Almost certainly not. An API is for software you are building. If you want a rent figure for a handful of addresses you would be paying a monthly minimum and writing code to answer a question a web page already answers.
Every vendor figure on this page is quoted from their own pages with the date we read it. Verified November 11, 2026; next review February 2027. Found something out of date? Tell us and we will correct it.