I've been cataloging free APIs for 2 weeks. I found 300+ APIs that require no API key and no payment.
Some things that surprised me:
Weather data: Open-Meteo gives you 16-day forecasts + historical data. Free. No key. Most developers pay $50-200/month for weather APIs.
Geocoding: Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) does forward + reverse geocoding. Free. Google Maps charges $5 per 1,000 requests.
Vulnerability scanning: OSV.dev covers 40+ ecosystems. Free. Snyk charges $25/month for basically the same data.
Academic papers: OpenAlex has 250M papers. Free. Elsevier/Scopus charges universities millions per year.
Stock data: Yahoo Finance endpoint gives real-time-ish prices. Free. Bloomberg terminal: $24,000/year.
My argument:
For most side projects and small companies, free APIs are more than enough. The premium APIs add:
- Higher rate limits (but 45 req/min from ip-api is fine for most)
- SLAs (but for side projects, who cares?)
- Support (but Stack Overflow exists)
The counter-argument:
"Free APIs can disappear overnight"
True. But paid APIs can also change pricing, get acquired, or shut down (remember Parse? Fabric? many others).
My full list
I cataloged everything here: awesome-free-apis-2026 (300+ APIs, grouped by category)
And built Python toolkits for the best ones: awesome-free-research-apis
What do you think? Are free APIs reliable enough for production? Or do you always go with paid options?
I'd especially love to hear from anyone who's been burned by a free API going down.
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