If you are a small business, a freelancer, or an indie developer trying to read bank transactions programmatically in Europe, the open banking API market looks deceptively simple on paper and surprisingly expensive in practice. PSD2 mandated that banks expose account access, but the cost structure that emerged on top of that mandate is what actually determines whether your project is viable.
This is a vendor-neutral walk through what the major European open banking API providers charge at the low end in 2026, why the cheap tier is thinner than people expect, and what the realistic options are if your budget is closer to "side project" than "enterprise procurement."
Why "free PSD2 API" is a misleading search
PSD2 requires every bank in the EEA to expose two interfaces:
AIS (Account Information Services) — read-only access to balances, transactions, and account metadata.
