I have a working API , doing few different strategies with options, pretty active. Looking for a different home other than IB that supports API (currently my code is in C#). i searched and searched cant find any real broker for options with API support.
best suggestion for you is to work backwards,- look at platforms that offer api w options-REDI/Sterling,etc and then find out who their clients are. For ex. Sterling has options API, call sterling and ask them what brokers uses Sterling i.e. Echotrade? (at least they used to 4 years ago)
Trading options through a broker using an API more efficiently than IB is surprisingly difficult. Becoming a CBOE member is pretty capital intensive so most smaller brokers you might find aren't going to clear those trades themselves which drives up costs for you. When you use IB you are piggybacking on the huge investment they've done for themselves in market making options which they pass on to you at a pretty reasonable price. To get any price/execution improvement I'm quite sure you'd have to go the more institutional route - splitting up execution platform from clearing. (Not using a broker, using a clearing company and paying for your own execution platform). Examples that come to mind is using RTS or ORC with NewEdge or Fortis. Either of these places is going to ask for a seven figure account balance and then you will pay 1K-20K /month depending on how much functionality you want in the platform. Maybe there's a discount broker alternative but I'm not really aware of any and I presume you've checked that out yourself. On the plus side, you are probably using my friend's API (C# / Interactive Brokers) which is well written.