The best free news API for most side projects is NewsData.io (200 credits a day, no card) or GNews (100 requests a day, no card). If you need full article text, the Guardian Open Platform gives 500 free calls a day. If you want zero signup, GDELT, Hacker News and Spaceflight News answer with no key at all. Every quota below was checked on the provider’s official page on October 22, 2026, and every keyless API was called live the same day.
Free news APIs differ on four things that matter more than the headline quota: freshness, search history, commercial use and card requirement. This guide compares 10 of them on exactly those points.
What is a free news API?
A free news API is an HTTP endpoint that returns news articles (headline, source, URL, publish time, often a snippet or image) as JSON, at no cost up to a daily or monthly quota. Aggregators pull from thousands of outlets; publisher APIs like the Guardian and NYT return their own archive, often with full text.
Most free tiers trade freshness for price. A 12 or 24 hour delay is common, and so is a “non-commercial only” clause. That’s fine for a prototype or a personal dashboard, not for a paid product.
Free news APIs compared
| API | Free quota | Delay / history | Card needed | Commercial use on free | Key needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsData.io | 200 credits/day (1-10 articles each) | 12 h delay, past 48 h | No | Not stated | Yes |
| GNews | 100 requests/day, 10 articles each | 12 h delay, 30 days | No | No | Yes |
| NewsAPI.org | 100 requests/day | 24 h delay, 1 month | No card field on signup | No (dev and test only) | Yes |
| Currents API | 250 requests/day | Up to 30 days | Not stated | Redistribution needs separate terms | Yes |
| World News API | 50 points/day, 1 request/second | Not stated | No | Not stated, attribution link required | Yes |
| Guardian Open Platform | 500 calls/day, 1 call/second | Full archive, 1.9M+ items | No card field on signup | No | Yes |
| NYT Developer APIs | 500 requests/day, 5/minute per API | Archive varies by API | Not stated | No | Yes |
| GDELT DOC 2.0 | 1 request every 5 seconds | Global, many languages | No | Not stated | No |
| Hacker News API | No rate limit currently | Real time | No | Not stated | No |
| Spaceflight News API | Not published | Real time, 36,000+ articles | No | Not stated | No |
“Not stated” means the official page didn’t say on October 22, 2026. Treat it as unknown, not as permission.
How these were tested
Every number comes from the provider’s own pricing page, FAQ or docs, read on October 22, 2026. The three keyless APIs (GDELT, Hacker News, Spaceflight News) got real requests and returned live October 2026 articles. The seven keyed endpoints were called without a key to confirm they exist and return a clean auth error (NewsAPI: 401 apiKeyMissing). No authenticated calls were made, so per-request result counts come from the pricing pages.
The 10 free news APIs, one by one
1. NewsData.io: the largest daily free quota
NewsData.io gives 200 API credits a day, and one credit returns between 1 and 10 articles. Its FAQ says plainly that no credit or debit card is needed for the free plan. The trade-off is freshness: free data is delayed by 12 hours and covers only the past 48 hours.
2. GNews: simple, and no payment details ever
GNews gives 100 requests a day with up to 10 articles per request, so roughly 1,000 articles a day. The pricing page says the free plan “never asks for payment details.” You get 30 days of history and a 12 hour delay. It’s non-commercial only, and CORS is enabled for localhost only.
curl "https://gnews.io/api/v4/top-headlines?lang=en&max=10&apikey=$GNEWS_KEY"
3. NewsAPI.org: the one tutorials use
NewsAPI is the name most tutorials reach for. The free Developer plan gives 100 requests a day, articles arrive with a 24 hour delay and search reaches back one month. Its FAQ says the plan “cannot be used in a staging or production environment.” The signup form asks for name, email and password only.
curl -H "X-Api-Key: $NEWSAPI_KEY" "https://newsapi.org/v2/everything?q=openapi&language=en"
4. Currents API: 250 requests a day
Currents gives 250 free requests a day for “evaluation, prototypes, and small apps,” with recent history up to 30 days. Redistribution and republication need separate terms, so don’t build a public news site on the free key. Whether signup asks for a card isn’t stated on the pricing page.
5. World News API: small quota, strict pacing
World News API’s free plan gives 50 points a day, 1 request per second and 1 concurrent request. No payment information is needed. One extra condition: free users must link to worldnewsapi.com from their site or app.
6. Guardian Open Platform: full article text for free
The Guardian’s Developer key is the best free route if you need the article body, not just a snippet. It allows up to 500 calls a day at 1 call per second, with access to article text across more than 1.9 million pieces of content.
It’s for non-commercial use, such as dissertations, hackathons and nonprofit apps. The old shared api-key=test no longer works (it returned Unauthorized on October 22, 2026), so register a key.
curl "https://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=api&show-fields=bodyText&api-key=$GUARDIAN_KEY"
7. New York Times Developer APIs: archive depth
The NYT portal offers several APIs (Top Stories, Article Search, Archive). Its FAQ sets two limits per API: 500 requests a day and 5 requests a minute, and it tells you to sleep 12 seconds between calls. Use is non-commercial only.
8. GDELT DOC 2.0: global coverage, no key
GDELT monitors news in many languages and exposes a full-text search API with no signup. Fire two requests too fast and you get a plain-text reply: “Please limit requests to one every 5 seconds.” Add sourcelang:english to the query if you only want English sources.
curl "https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/doc/doc?query=%22open%20source%22%20sourcelang:english&mode=artlist&maxrecords=10&format=json×pan=1d"
Throttled responses are plain text, not JSON, so check the body before you parse it.
9. Hacker News API: tech news, real time
The official Hacker News API runs on Firebase, needs no key and, per its README, has no rate limit at the moment. /v0/topstories.json returns up to 500 story IDs; you then fetch each one with /v0/item/<id>.json.
That two-step pattern means 30 headlines cost 31 calls, so cache item responses.
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json"
curl "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/8863.json"
10. Spaceflight News API: a niche feed with no limits
If your app is about launches, rockets or space missions, the Spaceflight News API is free, keyless and focused. Its v4 /articles/ endpoint reported 36,589 articles on October 22, 2026, and a search=launch query returned a NASA story published the day before.
No rate limit is published, and the project runs on donations, so cache what you fetch.
Free news APIs that need a second look
TheNewsAPI also has a $0 plan: 100 requests a day, but only 3 articles per request, so it’s the smallest result size here. Whether signup asks for a card isn’t stated .
Mediastack’s free plan gives 100 calls a month, with delayed data, non-commercial only. That’s about 3 calls a day.
Google News has no official API, so it’s left out.
How to choose a free news API
- Need full article text? Use the Guardian (500/day) or NYT (500/day). Aggregators mostly return snippets.
- Need many sources and no card? Use NewsData.io (200 credits/day) or GNews (100 requests, about 1,000 articles/day).
- Need zero signup? Use GDELT for global news, Hacker News for tech and Spaceflight News for space.
- Shipping a paid product? None of the keyed free tiers here clearly allow it. NewsAPI, GNews, Guardian, NYT and Mediastack say non-commercial or dev-only outright. Budget for a paid plan or a commercial key.
- Need breaking news? Free tiers delay 12 to 24 hours on NewsData.io, GNews and NewsAPI. The keyless feeds and publisher APIs are closer to real time.
If you’re building a broader project, the free APIs list and public APIs for testing cover more categories, and free movie APIs and the free crypto price API guide follow the same verified-quota format.
Let your coding agent test the news API with Apidog CLI
A news integration breaks quietly: a key expires or a field you parse goes missing. Your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) can write a test with Apidog CLI and run it on a schedule or in CI.
Set it up once:
npm install -g apidog-cli@latest
apidog auth login --with-token <YOUR_APIDOG_TOKEN>
apidog skill install
Shortcut: tell your agent “Read https://apidog.com/apidog-cli-installation-guide.md and set up Apidog CLI.” The guide is written for agents.
Then give your agent one prompt:
In Apidog project <projectId>, create an environment for GNews with base URL
https://gnews.io/api/v4. Create a test case for GET /top-headlines?lang=en&max=10
that asserts status 200, that "articles" is a non-empty array, and that every
article has title, url and publishedAt. Pass the key as an environment variable,
run it, and summarize any failures.
The agent checks the payload schema before it writes anything, then creates the case and runs it:
apidog environment create gnews-free --project <projectId> --base-url https://gnews.io/api/v4
apidog cli-schema get test-case-create
apidog cli-schema validate test-case-create --file case.json
apidog test-case create --project <projectId> --file case.json
apidog run --test-case <caseId> --project <projectId> -e <envId> --env-var "apikey=$GNEWS_KEY" -r cli,json
Testing the NYT or GDELT instead? Put the cases in a test suite and add --delay-request 12000 to apidog run so the run respects a 5-per-minute limit. The same command with -r junit drops into a pipeline; the Apidog CLI CI/CD guide shows the GitHub Actions setup, and Apidog CLI in Claude Code walks through the agent side. Apidog’s Free plan covers up to 4 users.
Make a 100-request quota last
- Cache by query and hour. News from a 12 hour delayed feed doesn’t change minute to minute. One cached call can serve every visitor for an hour.
- Ask for the maximum page size. On GNews,
max=10costs the same request asmax=1. - Rotate keyless sources for tech and space. Hacker News and Spaceflight News cost nothing per call, so save the keyed quota for general news.
FAQ
Is there a completely free news API with no key? Yes. GDELT DOC 2.0, the Hacker News API and the Spaceflight News API all answered real requests with no key on October 22, 2026.
Which free news API doesn’t need a credit card? NewsData.io, GNews and World News API state on their pricing pages that no payment details are needed. NewsAPI and Guardian signup forms have no payment fields. Keyless APIs need no account.
Can I use a free news API in production? Usually not. NewsAPI’s free plan is dev and test only, and GNews, the Guardian, NYT and Mediastack are non-commercial on free.
Why are free news API results 12 or 24 hours old? Providers delay free data to separate it from paid real-time feeds. NewsData.io and GNews delay 12 hours, NewsAPI 24 hours.
What is the best free news API for full article text? The Guardian Open Platform. Its free Developer key returns article text (show-fields=bodyText) at up to 500 calls a day, for non-commercial use.
