Yes, I know it's been asked 17 million times. The problem is, there are 58 million answers and the vast majority of them are sarcastic, rhetorical, or a simple "try this platform" without explanation of why.

I'm mostly just wanting an API that integrates well with Python that provides as real-time information as possible for a single stock symbol at a time. I believe my current usage is somewhere around 100 call/min IF I happen to be holding a stock. My calls per day is significantly lighter. I would prefer a free version, but I wouldn't mind paying a little bit if it was significantly more consistent and up to date.

Here are some that I have tried and problems I've had with them:
- yFinance seems to be delayed a little bit, but there's another weird thing going on. I've run 2 functionally identical programs side-by-side and one of them will start pulling the new price a good 20+ seconds before the other one, which is kinda a lot!
-Alpaca (free) seems to update slower than yFinance, which is odd given what I've been able to find with a google search. It also held the 'current price' at the Open of the minute that a particular stock was halted and not the Last (or Close) price when the halt was initiated. It also didn't update until 30s after trading was resumed.

Again, I'm not particularly opposed to paying a bit for 'live' data IF that data is truly "real-time" (meaning within the last couple seconds) (Alpaca does not) and returns the properly updated value with each API call (yFinance does not).