BirdieAPI Review 2026

BirdieAPI is a golf data API. It holds PGA Tour leaderboards, round scores and the strokes on each hole from the 2001 season on, and it serves them as 14 tools. Each tool is one REST endpoint and one MCP tool with the same name and the same parameters, so you can call it from code or point Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor at it.

The pitch is depth in one sport. BirdieAPI adds its own strokes-versus-field rating to the raw scores, so a round is measured against the field that played the same course. If you build golf models, that saves you a lot of joining. For a broader view of the category, see our sports data API comparison.

BirdieAPI reports 1,184 full PGA Tour leaderboards and about 8.5 million hole scores, with strokes on each hole for roughly 99% of PGA Tour rounds since 2001 (the site's own figures, checked November 2026). The LPGA (from 2002), LIV Golf (from 2022), the DP World Tour (from 2009) and the Korn Ferry Tour (from 2007) share the same key and credits.

• Leaderboards: finishing position, cut status, each round, earnings and season points.
• Scorecards and courses: par and yards per hole, and how each hole played.
• Player stats: driving, greens in regulation and putting lines for the PGA Tour from 2011.
• Ratings: strokes versus the field, plus par-3, par-4 and par-5 splits.
• Major winner odds: outright prices for the four men's majors, from 2021.

Hole-by-hole data covers the PGA Tour, and the Korn Ferry Tour from 2007. The other three tours carry round totals only.

Two things set it apart. The first is the rating work: every round is compared with its field and adjusted for field strength, and a rating uses only rounds played before each date, so a past rating is what it was then. The second is access. The same 14 tools run over REST and over a hosted MCP server, which suits an agent that answers questions like "how has McIlroy played at Augusta?" without any client code.

The odds side is narrow by design. get_winner_odds returns winner prices for the Masters, PGA Championship, U.S. Open and Open Championship from DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, ESPN BET and Pinnacle, among other books. Past majors are weekly snapshots, and an upcoming major refreshes daily while its market is open. There are no round, matchup or other-tournament prices. For those, pair it with an odds API from our sports odds API guide.

The data updates once a day, at about 10:00 UTC. There is no live shot-by-shot feed, so a round in progress shows as of the morning. For live scoring, add a push feed.

Every account gets 500 free credits a month with no card (checked November 2026). A call costs 1 credit for tournament lists, the schedule and player search, 2 credits for a leaderboard, scorecard, course or the ratings, and 5 credits for player stats, head-to-head and the winner odds. Empty results are not charged.

Paid plans are Starter at $19 a month for 10,000 credits, Pro at $49 for 30,000, and Scale at $149 for 125,000. Plan credits reset each period. Wallet top-ups run from $5 to $500 at 400 credits per dollar and do not expire while the account is open. All 14 endpoints are on every plan, including the free one. Commercial use is allowed inside your own product, but you may not pass the data on as a feed or dataset.

Sign up on the BirdieAPI sign-up page. The free plan gives you 500 credits every month and asks for no card. BirdieAPI verifies your email first, then you create a key from the dashboard (checked November 2026).

Send the key in an x-api-key header, or as Authorization: Bearer. The MCP endpoint also takes it as a ?key= parameter. ChatGPT and Claude can skip the key: they connect over MCP with a sign-in instead. If you lose a key, you revoke it on the keys page and make another. Paid plans start at $19 a month for 10,000 credits, and top-ups from $5 add credits that do not expire while the account is open.

This sample calls list_tournaments on https://mcp.birdieapi.com. Every tool is a POST to /v1/{tool} with a JSON body, and the key goes in x-api-key (from the docs, checked November 2026).

import os

import requests

resp = requests.post(
    "https://mcp.birdieapi.com/v1/list_tournaments",
    headers={"x-api-key": os.environ["BIRDIEAPI_API_KEY"]},
    json={"season": 2025, "major": True, "limit": 3},
    timeout=15,
)
resp.raise_for_status()

body = resp.json()
for t in body.get("data", body)["tournaments"]:
    print(t["name"], t["start_date"], t["winner_name"], t["winning_to_par"])
print(resp.headers.get("X-Credits-Remaining"))

The call costs 1 credit and returns the 2025 majors with name, start_date, winner_name and winning_to_par. The docs say REST responses wrap the result in a data key, and the sample shows the list without it, so the code reads both. Each response also carries X-Credits-Used and X-Credits-Remaining headers.

The limit is 60 requests a minute on every plan, and it drops to 10 a minute while your balance is under 100 credits. Credits are the spend boundary, not requests. A call that runs out of credits returns 402, an over-limit call returns 429, and a server error refunds its credits. Send an x-idempotency-key header to make retries safe (checked November 2026).

The docs list every endpoint with parameters and example responses. BirdieAPI publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 spec at mcp.birdieapi.com/openapi.json and a public tool catalogue with JSON Schema. The official Python client is birdieapi on PyPI. There is a hosted MCP server, a data changelog and a status page. Email support@birdieapi.com for help. For other MCP-ready feeds, see sports MCP servers.

• Golf bettors and modellers who want form, course history and head-to-head records in one call each.
• Analysts and researchers who need hole-by-hole rows back to 2001.
• Developers and AI builders who want a golf tool for an agent, with stable ids and a published OpenAPI spec.

If you also want live scores or prices for every tournament, you will pair it with a second feed, and the shared ids make that easy to join.

BirdieAPI is a focused, well-documented golf API. It is generous at the free tier, honest about what it leaves out, and priced per call, so a small project stays cheap. The 500 free credits are enough to test every endpoint. Start at birdieapi.com and make your first call on list_tournaments.

Last updated: 5 November 2026 · How providers get listed