Getting Prices

Here are some ways to download current or historical market prices for your commodities.

pricehist

pricehist is a standalone tool for fetching currency, cryptocurrency and stock prices. It can print h/ledger or beancount-style price directives directly.

hledger-pricehist is an optional small script to make it show up in the hledger commands list.

Install:

pipx install pricehist

List providers:

$ pricehist sources
alphavantage     Alpha Vantage
bankofcanada     Bank of Canada
coinbasepro      Coinbase Pro
coindeskbpi      CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index
coinmarketcap    CoinMarketCap
ecb              European Central Bank
yahoo            Yahoo! Finance

Show details about a provider's data:

$ pricehist source yahoo

Fetch prices. The format of the symbol argument varies by provider and commodity.

$ pricehist fetch -o ledger -s 2025-12-19 -e 2025-12-19 ecb EUR/USD
P 2025-12-19 00:00:00 EUR 1.1712 USD

$ pricehist fetch -o ledger -s 2025-12-19 -e 2025-12-19 yahoo TSLA
P 2025-12-19 00:00:00 TSLA 478.975006103515625 USD

$ pricehist fetch -o ledger -s 2025-12-19 -e 2025-12-19 yahoo ADA-USD
P 2025-12-19 00:00:00 ADA-USD 0.37601006031036376953125 USD

You can omit the start or end options to fetch a range of dates. Some commodities will not have prices available on weekends.

bittytax_price

bittytax_price, from the BittyTax project, can fetch currency and cryptocurrency prices (but not stock prices). It's quite easy to use, trying multiple providers automatically.

Install:

UK version:

git clone https://github.com/BittyTax/BittyTax.git
cd BittyTax && pip install .

or US version:

git clone https://github.com/BittyTax/BittyTax.git -b features/usa-tax-rules
cd BittyTax && pip install .

Run it once to set up a config file (~/.bittytax/bittytax.conf):

$ bittytax_price --version

Configure your preferred base currency in the config file:

local_currency: 'USD'

Fetch prices:

$ bittytax_price latest EUR
1 EUR=1.1712 USD via BittyTaxAPI (Euro)
1 EUR=$1.17 USD

$ bittytax_price latest BTC
1 BTC=87,953.36 USD via CryptoCompare (Bitcoin)
1 BTC=$87,953.36 USD

If you get Too Many Requests errors from Coingecko, you can remove them from data_source_crypto in the config file, or buy an API key, or specify a source with the -ds command line option.