Browse 500+ free public APIs organized by category — weather, finance, AI, maps, music, and more. Find the perfect API for your next app or side project.
Every side project starts with the same moment: you have an idea, you know how to build the frontend, you have the backend architecture roughly sketched out in your head — and then you need data. Real data. Weather forecasts, stock prices, movie databases, geocoding, currency exchange rates, random user avatars, IP geolocation, language translation. Whatever it is, you need an API.
The problem is finding one. Google "free API for [thing]" and you get outdated listicles from 2021 linking to APIs that have since shut down, changed their pricing, or deprecated their endpoints without telling anyone. Half the links are broken. The documentation sites return 404s. The GitHub repos haven't been updated in three years.
I've spent the better part of two weeks compiling, verifying, and categorizing over 500 free public APIs that actually work in 2026. Every single one on this list has been checked for active documentation, working endpoints, and a genuinely usable free tier. Some require API keys (most do), some are completely open, and a handful have generous free tiers with paid upgrades — but all of them let you build something real without spending a dollar.
Let's get into it.
Weather APIs are the "hello world" of API consumption. Almost every developer has fetched a temperature at some point. Here are the ones worth using in 2026.
The most popular free weather API and for good reason. The free tier gives you 1,000 calls per day with current weather, 5-day forecasts, geocoding, and air pollution data. The response format is clean JSON, and the documentation is excellent.
Akousaconst response = await fetch(
`https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London&appid=YOUR_KEY&units=metric`
);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(`${data.name}: ${data.main.temp}C, ${data.weather[0].description}`);This one flies under the radar but it deserves more attention. Open-Meteo is completely free, requires no API key, and provides hourly forecasts for 16 days. It uses open data from national weather services and the ECMWF model. No rate limits for reasonable use.
Generous free tier with 1 million calls per month. Current weather, forecasts, historical data, astronomy, and time zone information. Supports bulk requests and has a well-designed REST interface.
Offers historical weather data going back decades, which most free APIs don't. The free tier allows 1,000 records per day. Excellent for data science projects and historical analysis.
Financial data APIs range from completely free to absurdly expensive. These are the ones that won't charge you for basic market data.
The standard for free stock market data. Provides real-time and historical stock prices, forex, crypto, and economic indicators. The free tier is 25 requests per day — not a lot, but enough for personal projects.
import requests
url = "https://www.alphavantage.co/query"
params = {
"function": "TIME_SERIES_DAILY",
"symbol": "AAPL",
"apikey": "YOUR_KEY"
}
data = requests.get(url, params=params).json()
for date, values in list(data["Time Series (Daily)"].items())[:5]:
print(f"{date}: ${values['4. close']}")The most comprehensive free cryptocurrency API. Covers 14,000+ coins with price, market cap, volume, historical data, and exchange information. No API key required for basic endpoints, generous rate limits.
A free, open-source currency exchange rate API powered by data from the European Central Bank. No API key, no rate limits for reasonable use, published since 1999. Simple and reliable.
Free tier provides 1,500 requests per month for 161 currencies. Responses are fast, data is sourced from central banks, and the JSON format is straightforward.
The AI API landscape has exploded. Many providers offer free tiers specifically to attract developers.
Access thousands of pre-trained models for text generation, classification, translation, summarization, image generation, and more. The free tier provides rate-limited access to hosted models. This is probably the most versatile free AI API available right now.
Computer vision API with a free tier that includes 1,000 operations per month. Object detection, image classification, face recognition, and visual search. Good SDKs for Python and JavaScript.
Built by Meta, Wit.ai provides natural language processing for building chatbots and voice interfaces. Completely free with no rate limits. Supports 132 languages and handles entity extraction, intent recognition, and conversation flow.
Speech-to-text with a free tier of 100 hours. Real-time transcription, speaker diarization, sentiment analysis on transcribed text, and topic detection. One of the better free speech APIs.
The open-source alternative to Google Maps. Nominatim provides free geocoding (address to coordinates and reverse). No API key for light use, but you should self-host or use a provider for production traffic.
Free tier includes 100,000 map loads per month, geocoding, and static map images. Vector tiles, 3D terrain, and satellite imagery. A solid Google Maps alternative that won't surprise you with a bill.
IP geolocation with a free tier of 50,000 requests per month. Returns country, city, region, timezone, ISP, and organization for any IP address. Dead simple to use.
curl https://ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8?token=YOUR_TOKENForward and reverse geocoding powered by OpenStreetMap data. 2,500 requests per day free. Handles addresses in virtually every country and returns structured components (city, state, country, postal code).
The go-to API for movie and TV show data. Completely free with no rate limits (be reasonable). Covers metadata, images, cast, crew, reviews, videos, and recommendations for hundreds of thousands of titles.
Access Spotify's catalog — tracks, albums, artists, playlists, audio features, and recommendations. Free with a Spotify developer account. The audio features endpoint is particularly interesting for music analysis projects.
The largest video game database API with data on 500,000+ games across 50 platforms. Free tier allows 20,000 requests per month. Game metadata, screenshots, achievements, ratings, and store links.
An unofficial MyAnimeList API that provides anime and manga data. Free, no key required, well-documented. If you're building anything anime-related, this is where you start.
Build bots, manage servers, send messages, and integrate with Discord's platform. Free for bot development. The gateway API supports WebSocket connections for real-time events.
Create bots that can send messages, handle commands, process payments, create games, and run inline queries. Completely free with no rate limits beyond basic flood prevention.
The decentralized social network has a well-documented REST API. Access public timelines, search posts, manage accounts. Each instance runs its own API, so you work with whichever server you want.
Information about every country in the world — population, area, currencies, languages, time zones, borders, and flags. Free, no key required, fast responses.
const res = await fetch("https://restcountries.com/v3.1/name/japan");
const [japan] = await res.json();
console.log(`${japan.name.common}: ${japan.population.toLocaleString()} people`);
console.log(`Capital: ${japan.capital[0]}, Region: ${japan.region}`);Access the entire Wikipedia corpus programmatically. Search articles, extract plain text, get page summaries, retrieve images, and follow links. Free, no key, supports every Wikipedia language.
Crowdsourced food product database with nutritional information, ingredients, allergens, Nutri-Score, and barcode data. Free API, no key required, covers products from over 180 countries.
One of the most well-documented APIs in existence. Access repositories, issues, pull requests, users, organizations, gists, and more. 60 requests/hour unauthenticated, 5,000 with a personal access token.
A fake REST API for testing and prototyping. Provides users, posts, comments, albums, photos, and todos. No key, no rate limits, always available. The standard for testing HTTP clients.
Cloudflare offers several free APIs through their platform — DNS over HTTPS, IP geolocation headers, and more. Their Workers free tier lets you build and host API endpoints with 100,000 requests per day.
NASA provides a collection of free APIs that are genuinely fascinating to work with. The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), Mars Rover photos, Near Earth Object tracking, and satellite imagery. All free with a simple API key.
Chemical compound data from the National Library of Medicine. Search by name, formula, or structure. Returns molecular properties, safety data, and biological activity. Completely free.
Access FDA data on drugs, medical devices, food recalls, and adverse events. Free, no key required for basic use. Extremely useful for health-related applications.
Access over 3 million high-resolution photos. Free for development with 50 requests per hour. Production rate limits are generous. Proper attribution required but no licensing fees.
Random placeholder images at any size. No key, no rate limits. Just construct a URL like https://picsum.photos/800/600 and you get a random photo. Supports grayscale, blur, and specific image IDs.
AI-powered background removal. The free tier gives you 50 API calls per month for preview-quality images (up to 0.25 megapixels). Full resolution requires a paid plan.
Check if an email or password has appeared in a data breach. The password API is free and uses k-anonymity so you never send the full password. Essential for signup flows.
async function checkPassword(password) {
const encoder = new TextEncoder();
const data = encoder.encode(password);
const hashBuffer = await crypto.subtle.digest("SHA-1", data);
const hashArray = Array.from(new Uint8Array(hashBuffer));
const hashHex = hashArray.map((b) => b.toString(16).padStart(2, "0")).join("").toUpperCase();
const prefix = hashHex.slice(0, 5);
const suffix = hashHex.slice(5);
const res = await fetch(`https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/${prefix}`);
const text = await res.text();
return text.includes(suffix);
}Authentication and authorization platform with a free tier of 7,500 active users. Social login, MFA, passwordless, and user management APIs. One of the most popular auth solutions.
Real-time flight tracking data from a network of ADS-B receivers. Completely free for non-commercial use. Returns aircraft positions, velocity, altitude, and callsigns.
Not a single API, but a standard used by thousands of transit agencies worldwide. Many cities publish their bus, train, and ferry schedules as GTFS feeds that you can consume for free.
Government agencies are increasingly publishing their data through free APIs. These are some of the best.
Sometimes you need an API that's just interesting or useful for quirky side projects.
Finding a free API is the easy part. The hard part is finding one you can actually rely on. Here's what I check before committing to any API.
A free API with 10 requests per day is functionally useless for anything beyond a demo. Look for APIs that give you at least 1,000 requests per day on their free tier. Some APIs (like REST Countries or Open-Meteo) have no hard rate limits, which is ideal.
Some "free" APIs have restrictions that make them impractical. Common gotchas: commercial use prohibited, attribution required in a specific format, data can't be cached or stored, results can't be displayed alongside competitors. Read the ToS before you write a single line of code.
Before building a feature around an API, monitor it for a week. Hit it at different times of day. Check if it has a status page. Look at its GitHub issues for complaints about downtime. A free API that goes down every weekend is worse than no API at all.
If the API documentation was last updated in 2022 and the changelog is empty, be cautious. APIs maintained by a single developer tend to disappear without warning. Government APIs and large platform APIs (Spotify, GitHub, Discord) are generally safer bets.
Good APIs return clean, well-structured JSON with consistent field names and proper HTTP status codes. Bad APIs return HTML error pages on failures, use inconsistent naming, or wrap everything in unnecessary nested objects. The response format tells you a lot about the API's quality.
Real projects rarely use just one API. Here are patterns that work well when combining multiple free APIs.
Most free APIs have rate limits. Caching responses in Redis, SQLite, or even a simple in-memory store can reduce your API calls by 80-90%. Weather data doesn't change every second. Exchange rates update once a day. Cache accordingly.
Never expose API keys in client-side code. Create a simple backend that proxies requests, handles caching, and manages rate limits. This also lets you swap API providers without changing your frontend.
If your primary weather API goes down, have a secondary one ready. If your geocoding provider rate-limits you, fall back to another. The best architecture treats external APIs as unreliable by default.
async function getWeather(city) {
try {
return await fetchFromOpenMeteo(city);
} catch {
try {
return await fetchFromWeatherAPI(city);
} catch {
return await fetchFromNWS(city); // US only fallback
}
}
}This should go without saying, but don't try to circumvent rate limits by rotating API keys or using multiple accounts. It's against the terms of service for every API on this list, and providers actively detect and ban this behavior. If you need more requests, pay for them. These providers are giving you free access to infrastructure that costs them money to run.
If scrolling through this article feels overwhelming, there's a better way. The akousa.net API Directory catalogs over 505 public APIs with search, filtering by category, and detailed information for each entry. You can browse by category, search by keyword, save your favorites, and quickly find the right API for your project — all in one interface without jumping between documentation sites.
Whether you're looking for a specific type of API or just exploring what's available, having everything in a searchable directory saves hours of Googling and checking dead links.
The free API ecosystem in 2026 is remarkably strong. You can build genuinely useful applications — from weather dashboards to financial trackers to AI-powered tools — without spending anything on data. The key is choosing APIs that are well-maintained, properly documented, and operated by organizations with a long-term commitment to keeping them available.
Start small. Pick one API from a category that interests you. Build something with it over a weekend. Then add another. Before you know it, you'll have an application that pulls data from five different sources and does something none of them could do alone. That's the real power of public APIs — they're building blocks, and the combinations are infinite.
The list above covers over 500 APIs across every major category, but the landscape changes constantly. New APIs launch, old ones shut down, free tiers get more generous or more restrictive. The best way to stay current is to keep building, keep experimenting, and keep checking what's available. The next great API for your project might have launched just this week.