Crypto Fear & Greed Index Scraper

Why use this scraper

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index from alternative.me is one of the most quoted sentiment signals in crypto: a daily 0-100 score with a plain-English label (Extreme Fear, Fear, Neutral, Greed, Extreme Greed) that traders, newsletter writers and dashboard builders pull into their own tools every day. alternative.me publishes it as a small public API, but pulling it into a pipeline, a spreadsheet refresh, or an Apify-based workflow alongside other market data means writing and maintaining a fetch script instead of just consuming a feed.

This actor is that feed: point it at how many days of history you want, from a single day to the entire archive since the index launched in 2018, and get back clean, structured records ready to drop into a trading bot, a rebalancing rule, or a daily newsletter. Because it runs on Apify like any other scheduled job, it slots into the same pipelines you already use for price data, on-chain metrics or social scraping, instead of living as a one-off script on a laptop that nobody remembers to keep running.

Overview

Input is a single number: how many days of history to return. Output is one record per day, each with the date, the 0-100 value, the plain-English classification and the index's own update timestamp. A default run (30 days) finishes in seconds; the full history since 2018 is a few thousand records and still runs well within the actor's timeout.

There is nothing to configure beyond that: no target URL, no login, no pagination to manage. The actor exists to remove the one recurring chore around this index, which is remembering to go fetch it, and to make it a normal step in an automated pipeline instead of a manual, easy-to-forget task.

Supported inputs

• limit (days of history) - how many of the most recent days to fetch. Default 30. Set to 0 to pull the entire history since the index launched in 2018.
• debug - verbose logging for troubleshooting a run; does not change the output.

There is no keyword, URL or pagination to configure: the index has one series, and this actor's only real decision is how much of it you want back.

Use cases

• Crypto trading bots - use the daily value as a contrarian signal (buy into Extreme Fear, trim into Extreme Greed) inside an automated strategy.
• Portfolio rebalancing rules - trigger a rebalance check whenever the classification crosses into Fear or Greed territory.
• Newsletter and content automation - pull today's value and classification into a daily or weekly crypto newsletter without manual copy-paste.
• Market research and backtesting - fetch the full history to correlate the index against price action, on-chain activity or your own signals.
• Dashboards - feed a live sentiment tile alongside price and volume widgets.
• Risk alerting - schedule a daily run and fire a notification whenever the classification flips to Extreme Fear or Extreme Greed, without polling the source website yourself.
• Academic and independent research - pull the full multi-year series as a clean dataset for studying the relationship between sentiment and crypto price cycles.

How it works

The actor reads alternative.me's public Fear & Greed Index feed directly and normalizes each daily entry into a consistent record: date, value, classification and the source's own countdown to its next update. alternative.me computes the score itself from a mix of market signals (volatility, momentum, social activity, surveys, dominance and search trends); this actor does not recompute or alter that score, it delivers alternative.me's published number as-is, so it stays consistent with the number quoted everywhere else that cites the index.

That matters for anyone comparing this actor's output against a chart on alternative.me's own site, a tweet quoting today's reading, or another tool that also pulls from the same source: the numbers will always match, because there is only one upstream number and this actor does not touch it.

Input configuration

Today's value only:

{
  "limit": 1
}

Last 30 days (default), for a rolling dashboard:

{
  "limit": 30
}

Full history since 2018, for backtesting:

{
  "limit": 0
}

Output sample

Real item from a production run:

{
  "date": "2026-09-21",
  "value": 70,
  "classification": "Greed",
  "timeUntilUpdate": 17225,
  "timestamp": "2026-09-21T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Each additional day requested returns one more record in the same shape, ordered by date.

Key output fields

Field	Type	Description
date	string	Calendar date the reading applies to (YYYY-MM-DD)
value	integer	Index value, 0 (Extreme Fear) to 100 (Extreme Greed)
classification	string	One of Extreme Fear, Fear, Neutral, Greed, Extreme Greed
timeUntilUpdate	integer	Seconds until alternative.me refreshes today's reading (only meaningful for the most recent day)
timestamp	string	ISO timestamp of the reading

Pricing

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.00005
Entry scraped (apify-default-dataset-item)	$0.0005 per day returned

Pulling the default 30 days costs about $0.015; a single day costs half a cent. Errors are never charged.

What makes this richer than the competition

• gochujang/fear-greed-tracker (5 users/30d) charges $0.003 per day of data, six times this actor's $0.0005, for the same underlying alternative.me feed plus extra features (regime detection, rolling averages, Telegram alerts) most integrations do not need for a straight data pull.
• hichemdev/crypto-fear-greed-index (2 users/30d) adds a $0.001 actor-start fee on top of its per-record charge for the same current-plus-historical data this actor returns.

This actor is the highest-traffic Fear & Greed scraper on the Store (30 users in the last 30 days against 5 or fewer for the alternatives above) and the cheapest per day of data, with no separate start fee. For teams that only need the number and the label, rather than a bundled alerting or analytics layer, it is the leaner and cheaper option of the three.

Notes & limitations

• This actor mirrors alternative.me's own index; it does not build an independent sentiment score, so a change in alternative.me's methodology changes this actor's output too.
• timeUntilUpdate is only accurate for the most recent day: it reflects alternative.me's countdown to its next refresh, not a property of historical entries.
• The index updates once per day; running this actor more than once between alternative.me's updates returns the same latest value.
• This actor covers the crypto-market version of the index only; it does not scrape the separate CNN Fear & Greed Index used for US equities, which is a different methodology from a different publisher.

FAQ

How far back does the history go? To the index's launch in 2018. Set limit to 0 to pull everything.

Does this need an API key? No, alternative.me's Fear & Greed feed is public and this actor needs no credentials.

Can I get intraday updates? No, the index itself is a daily figure; there is no intraday granularity to extract.

Is the value the same one quoted on alternative.me's website? Yes, this actor returns alternative.me's own published value and classification unchanged.

What is timeUntilUpdate useful for? Scheduling your next pull just after alternative.me refreshes, instead of polling more often than the source updates.

Can I schedule this to run automatically? Yes, use an Apify schedule to run it daily and feed the new record straight into your own database or webhook.

Does limit: 0 cost more than a normal run? It scales with the number of days returned, like every other setting: since the full history is a few thousand days at $0.0005 each, pulling it once costs a few dollars, which is usually cheaper than re-running the actor daily for years to build the same history yourself.

Can I filter to only Extreme Fear or Extreme Greed days? Not in the input; pull the range you need and filter on classification downstream, since that keeps the actor simple and the pricing predictable.

Is there a rate limit on how often I can run this? No hard limit from this actor; the practical ceiling is that the index itself only updates once a day, so running it more often than that returns duplicate readings.

For AI Agents & LLM Apps

Call this actor from an MCP client via mcp.apify.com, or synchronously via the Apify API for a quick sentiment check inside an agent's decision loop:

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/gio21~fear-greed-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"limit": 7}'

The response is the dataset items directly: a week of daily values an agent can reason over without any extra parsing.

Disclaimer

This actor is an independent tool that republishes the publicly available Crypto Fear & Greed Index. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by alternative.me or any of its operators. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Nothing in this actor's output is financial advice.

SEO Keywords

Crypto Fear and Greed Index API, alternative.me scraper, crypto sentiment index API, Fear Greed Index historical data, crypto market sentiment scraper