Free Public APIs — Maintained Directory
Public APIs that are genuinely free to start with, listed with their authentication requirements and rate limits.
Free weather forecast API — no API key required. 7-day hourly forecasts, historical data, and climate projections.
Current weather, forecasts, historical data, and air quality for any location. Free tier: 1,000 calls/day.
Current weather, 14-day forecasts, historical data, and astronomy data. Free tier: 1M calls/month.
Console-friendly weather API. Returns plain text, JSON, or PNG weather reports with no registration.
Data about every country: name, capital, population, area, currencies, languages, flag, and borders. No key required.
Free geocoding and reverse-geocoding using OpenStreetMap data. Convert addresses to coordinates and back.
Geolocate any IP address — country, city, ISP, timezone, latitude, and longitude. Free for non-commercial use.
IP geolocation, ASN, carrier, and timezone data. Free tier: 50,000 requests/month.
IP geolocation API returning country, city, timezone, and coordinates. Completely free with no rate limits.
Timezone lookup by coordinates or city name. Returns UTC offset, DST status, and timezone name. Free: 1 call/second.
Cryptocurrency prices, market data, exchange rates, and coin metadata. Free tier: 30 calls/minute with no key.
Live and historical currency exchange rates for 161 currencies. Free tier: 1,500 requests/month.
Open-source foreign exchange rates backed by ECB data. No API key required. Daily and historical rates.
Stock prices, technical indicators, forex, and crypto data. Free tier: 25 requests/day.
Stock data, financial statements, earnings, ratios, and market news. Free tier: 250 requests/day.
The Movie Database — movies, TV shows, cast, crew, reviews, trailers, and streaming providers. Free with attribution.
Movie and TV show data from IMDb: titles, ratings, cast, plot, poster, and awards. Free tier: 1,000 requests/day.
TV show schedules, episode lists, cast info, and images. No API key required for basic access.
Open music encyclopedia — artists, albums, recordings, releases, and labels. Free and open-source.
Music scrobbling, artist bios, album info, tags, and similar artists. Free tier available.
Book data from the Internet Archive — titles, authors, covers, ISBN lookups, and reading lists. Completely free.
Complete Pokémon data — species, abilities, moves, items, evolutions, and locations. Free and no key required.
Collection of NASA APIs: Astronomy Picture of the Day, Mars rover photos, asteroid tracking, Earth imagery, and more.
Launch data, rockets, capsules, launchpads, and mission history for SpaceX. Free and no key required.
Real-time International Space Station location (lat/long) and number of people currently in space.
Global air quality measurements from thousands of monitoring stations. Pollutants: PM2.5, NO2, O3, CO, SO2, and BC.
Real-time and historical earthquake data from the USGS. Filter by magnitude, location, and time range.
Global development indicators — GDP, population, poverty, health, education, and energy data for 250 countries.
Search and retrieve articles from 80,000+ news sources worldwide. Free tier: 100 requests/day for developer use.
Search The Guardian's content API for articles, tags, sections, and editions. Free: 12 calls/second.
Search NYT articles, bestsellers, movies, books, and top stories. Free tier: 500 requests/day per key.
Y Combinator's Hacker News stories, comments, jobs, and user profiles. Public API, no key required.
Fake REST API for testing and prototyping. Posts, users, comments, albums, photos, todos — no setup required.
Fake JSON data for testing: products, users, carts, posts, recipes, and images. Supports pagination and search.
Generate random user profiles including name, email, address, avatar, and demographics. No key needed.
Random placeholder images with optional size, blur, and grayscale. No key required.
HTTP testing service. Inspect request headers, body, auth, status codes, cookies, and more from your own HTTP client.
Aggregated GitHub repository listing hundreds of categorised free public APIs with auth type and HTTPS status.
Global meal and recipe database with images, ingredients, instructions, and YouTube videos. Free tier available.
Cocktail and drink database with recipes, ingredients, and photos. Free tier with API key.
Open database of food products worldwide — ingredients, nutrition facts, allergens, and labels. No key needed.
US government food nutrition database — calories, macros, vitamins, and minerals for 600,000+ foods.
Word definitions, phonetics, part of speech, examples, synonyms, and antonyms. Free and no key required.
Open-source machine translation API. Self-hostable. Free public instance available at libretranslate.com.
Grammar, spelling, and style checker for 30+ languages. Free tier: 20 requests/minute.
US government open data portal — datasets across agriculture, climate, education, energy, finance, and health.
European Union statistics — demographics, economy, environment, and regional data. REST API with no key.
Public holidays for 100+ countries and regions. Supports historical and future years. No key required.
US FDA open data — drug adverse events, recalls, labeling, medical devices, and food safety. Free: 240 requests/minute.
What to check before you build on one
"Free" covers a wide range. These are the questions that determine whether an API is usable for what you have in mind:
- Rate limit, and what happens at the limit —A hard 429 and a silent degradation to stale data are very different failure modes. Find out which you get.
- Whether it needs a key —Keyless APIs are convenient but cannot be called from a browser without exposing your usage to abuse. Keyed APIs require a backend proxy so the key is never shipped to the client.
- CORS policy —An API without permissive CORS headers cannot be called directly from a web page, regardless of whether it needs a key. You will need a server-side proxy.
- Commercial-use terms —Several free tiers permit personal and educational use only. Read the terms before it matters.
- Attribution requirements —Many free data sources require visible credit. It is usually a single line and it is usually mandatory.
- Uptime expectations —A free tier rarely carries an SLA. Cache aggressively and degrade gracefully — assume it will be unavailable at some point.
- Data freshness —Free tiers frequently serve delayed data. For financial and weather APIs in particular, check the lag before relying on it.
About
The Free Data APIs directory catalogues 46 free and freemium public REST APIs across 10 categories — from weather forecasts and stock prices to recipe databases and NASA space imagery. Each entry shows the authentication method (None, API Key, or OAuth), whether HTTPS is supported, a plain-English description, and a direct link to the documentation. The colour-coded auth badges let you spot no-key APIs instantly.
How to use
- 1 Filter by category (Weather, Finance, Geography, Entertainment, Science, News, Dev/Testing, Food, Language, Government).
- 2 Search by API name, keyword, or data type.
- 3 Green "None" badge means no API key is required — the easiest to get started with.
- 4 Click any card to open the official API documentation.
- What does "no API key required" mean?
- APIs marked with a "None" authentication badge can be called directly from your code with no registration or key. You just make an HTTP request to the endpoint and get data back. These are the quickest to prototype with — examples include Open-Meteo (weather), REST Countries (country data), and JokeAPI (jokes).
- Are freemium APIs really free to use?
- Yes, up to a limit. Freemium APIs offer a free tier with a monthly or daily request cap — enough for side projects, prototypes, and low-traffic applications. If your app exceeds the free tier limit, you would need to upgrade to a paid plan. The directory notes each API's authentication type so you know what to expect before signing up.
- How do I use a public API in my project?
- Most APIs listed here are standard REST APIs that return JSON. Make an HTTP GET request to the endpoint URL using fetch() in JavaScript, requests in Python, or any HTTP library in your language. For APIs that require a key, register on the provider's website, copy the key, and include it as a query parameter or Authorization header as specified in their documentation.
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