Alex Spinov

Posted on Mar 25

I Tracked Every API I Used for 30 Days — Here Are the 7 That Survived

#python #api #webdev #productivity

The Experiment

Last month I tracked every free API I integrated into projects. Started with 23. After hitting rate limits, broken docs, surprise paywalls, and random downtime, only 7 survived.

Here's what actually works in production.

The Survivors

1. OpenAlex (Academic Data)

What: 250M+ research papers, authors, institutions
Why it survived: Generous limits, clean JSON, no key needed
Surprise: Better than Google Scholar for programmatic access

import requests
r = requests.get("https://api.openalex.org/works?search=transformer+architecture&per_page=5")
papers = r.json()["results"]

2. Open-Meteo (Weather)

What: Weather data for any location, historical + forecast
Why it survived: No API key, 10K requests/day, actually accurate
Killed: OpenWeatherMap (required key + had wrong forecasts)

3. Internet Archive Wayback CDX

What: 800B+ archived web pages
Why it survived: No limits, unique data no one else has
Use case: Competitive analysis — see how any website changed over time

4. crt.sh (SSL Certificates)

What: Certificate transparency logs
Why it survived: Finds subdomains that even DNS enumeration misses
Caveat: Slow on popular domains, cache your results

5. ip-api.com (Geolocation)

What: IP to location, ISP, timezone
Why it survived: No key for non-commercial use, 45 req/min
Killed: ipinfo.io (50K/month sounds generous until you're processing logs)

6. ORCID (Researcher Profiles)

What: 18M+ researcher IDs with publications and affiliations
Why it survived: The only reliable way to verify someone's academic record
Use case: Built an automated reference checker for a hiring tool

7. GitHub API (with token)

What: You know what GitHub is
Why it survived: It's GitHub. 5000 req/hr with token. Enough said.
Pro tip: Use GraphQL endpoint for complex queries — 1 call instead of 10

The Casualties

API	Why It Died
OpenWeatherMap	Required key, inaccurate for my region
NewsAPI	Free tier = yesterday's news only
Twitter/X API	$100/month for basic access. LOL.
Google Maps	$200 credit burns fast with geocoding
Alpha Vantage	5 calls/minute makes it useless for any real work
Abstract API	Nice docs, but email verification was wrong 40% of the time
RapidAPI freemium APIs	Half are abandoned, other half have surprise $0.01/call charges

Pattern I Noticed

The best free APIs are built by non-profits, governments, or open-source projects. Companies always add a paywall eventually. Open-source APIs don't.

What APIs survived YOUR filter?

Seriously — what free APIs do you actually use in production? I'm always looking for more reliable ones to add to my toolkit.

I maintain a curated list of free APIs on GitHub if you want the full collection.

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