About GetFreeAPIs

Why this site exists

Nearly every free API directory on the web is a copy of the same community-maintained list. Those copies are made once and then left alone. Links rot, providers shut down, free tiers quietly become paid, and the directory keeps cheerfully listing them for years. Finding a working free API becomes a game of clicking until something responds.

We built GetFreeAPIs to fix the specific part of that problem that is actually fixable: we check. Every listing gets probed automatically, and we publish what we find, including the failures. A dead API marked dead is more useful than a dead API marked nothing at all.

What we do differently

• We verify listings. Requests go out to every entry in the catalogue and we record the status, the response time and the redirect chain. Those results appear on the listing and on our status page.
• We measure CORS ourselves. Upstream lists mark most entries as unknown. We send a real request with an Origin header and read the answer off the response, which tells you whether the API will work from browser JavaScript.
• We give every API its own page. Most directories are a wall of cards that bounce you straight off-site. We would rather answer the question first.
• We say when we do not know. Entries we have not yet checked are marked unverified rather than being given a status we have not measured.

Where the data comes from

The catalogue is assembled from three public sources, then normalised, deduplicated and checked independently:

• public-apis/public-apis — the largest community-maintained list
• public-api-lists — an actively maintained fork with cleaner entries
• freepublicapis.com — contributes reliability and latency measurements

Those three overlap heavily. After deduplicating on the canonical documentation URL we are left with 2,712 unique APIs across 56 categories, of which 1,051 need no API key at all.

The catalogue is rebuilt on a schedule and committed to source control, so the site keeps working even if an upstream source disappears. That is not hypothetical: the API that several older directories were built on stopped resolving, and those sites now render nothing at all.

Who runs it

This site is built and maintained by Sandy, an independent developer. It is a one-person project: the crawler that assembles the catalogue, the checker that probes every listing, the site itself and the writing are all mine.

I also built SaveFromInternet and GrabReels, both of which run on other people’s APIs. Several years of that — parsers breaking when a platform shipped a change, rate limits arriving unannounced, endpoints disappearing overnight — is where this directory came from. I kept reaching for a list of free APIs and finding that nobody had checked whether the entries still worked.

That is the whole claim to expertise here, and it is deliberately a narrow one: I am not an authority on every API listed, and the site does not pretend otherwise. What I can tell you is what happened when our checker called each one, on which date, and what came back. Everything published on this site is measured rather than repeated, and where we have not measured something we say so.

Corrections are genuinely welcome. If a listing is wrong or out of date, tell us and it gets fixed.

How we pay for it

The site is free and we intend to keep it that way. Running costs are covered by advertising. Ads never influence which APIs are listed, how they are ranked, or what our checks report. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed here and on the disclaimer page before it takes effect.

Corrections

If a listing is wrong, out of date, or unfairly marked as failing, tell us and we will look at it. Our editorial policy sets out how we handle corrections. You can reach us through the contact page.