News & Open Data APIs
Free news and open data APIs with verified curl examples: Hacker News items, spaceflight news and public health datasets. No API key needed.
13 tested APIs with full docs · 13 need no key · 33 more listed
Tested, with full documentation
We called each of these before publishing. Every page carries a working curl command, the real JSON response it returned, parameters and common errors.
Chronicling America (loc.gov)
Free Library of Congress newspaper API with no key: full-text search across millions of digitised historic US newspaper pages, with OCR text and page images. Tested example included.
DataCube AI News
Free AI industry news API with no key: a calendar index of curated weeks and days, then per-period feeds of tech news, funding rounds, trends and videos. Tested example included.
disease.sh
Free open disease and health statistics API with no key: global and per-country case data, historical time series and vaccination figures. Tested example.
Hacker News
Official Hacker News API with no key: top stories, comments, users and live item feeds via Firebase. Extremely stable. Tested curl example and live JSON.
Hacker News Search (Algolia)
Free Algolia-powered Hacker News search API with no key: full-text search across all stories and comments with filtering by points, date and author. Tested.
Lobsters
Free Lobsters API with no key: hottest and newest technology stories with tags, scores, comments and submitter data as plain JSON. No signup. Tested.
Noozra
Free news headlines API with no key: articles from 200+ curated sources with headline, source, category, image URL and its pixel dimensions. Tested example included.
RSS to JSON
Free RSS to JSON API with no key: convert any RSS or Atom feed into clean JSON, with feed metadata, items, thumbnails and publication dates. Tested example.
Sonto
Free tech news API with no key: curated AI and technology stories with machine-written summaries, category tags and an interestingness score. Tested example included.
Spaceflight News
Free spaceflight news API with no key: articles, blogs and reports from major space outlets, with search, filtering and pagination. Tested curl example.
Substack Public Posts
Undocumented but public Substack endpoint listing a publication's posts as JSON, with titles, dates, reaction counts, word counts and paywall status. Tested example included.
Tagesschau
Free German news API with no key: the ARD Tagesschau homepage as structured JSON, with headlines, teaser images in every crop and regional tagging. Tested example included.
Wikipedia On This Day
Free Wikimedia On This Day API with no key: historical events, births, deaths and holidays for any calendar date, with linked Wikipedia articles. Tested.
Choosing between these News & Open Data APIs
Truly free news APIs are rare — most commercial providers cap free tiers at a few hundred requests a month and forbid production use. The APIs in this category are the exceptions: community or non-profit run, key-free, and usable in real projects.
The Hacker News Firebase API is the most reliable of the group and has been stable for over a decade, making it a safe dependency for aggregators and dashboards.
More News & Open Data APIs in the directory
33 further APIs in this category, of which 6 need no API key. These are catalogued from the public-API lists and link straight to each provider's own documentation — we have not tested them yet, so treat the auth and CORS flags as the upstream list's claim rather than ours. They are promoted to a full tested page as we work through them.
| API | What it does | Auth |
|---|---|---|
| APITube News API | Monitor news sources from around the world in real-time. Get the latest news articles from more than 500,000 news sources in 60 languages. | KeyCORS |
| Associated Press | Search for news and metadata from Associated Press | Key |
| Chronicling America | Provides access to millions of pages of historic US newspapers from the Library of Congress | None |
| Currents | Latest news published in various news sources, blogs and forums | KeyCORS |
| DataCube AI | Daily curated AI industry news, funding rounds and trends in 8 languages | None |
| Feedbin | RSS reader | OAuth |
| Finlight | Realtime financial news with sentiment and article content | Key |
| Florida Man | Static JSON dataset of 10,000+ Florida Man headlines by date | NoneCORS |
| Free News API | Search and retrieve news articles with full-text search, filters and cursor pagination | Key |
| GNews | Search for news from various sources | KeyCORS |
| Graphs for Coronavirus | Each Country separately and Worldwide Graphs for Coronavirus. Daily updates | NoneCORS |
| HackerNews Node | Api to get related articles about Node.js in Hacker News | Key |
| HasData: Structured Web Data APIs | Real-time Google News, SERP, and Web Scraping APIs. Extract structured public data from any news outlet or search engine at scale without blocks | Key |
| Inshorts News | Provides news from inshorts | None |
| MarketAux | Live stock market news with tagged tickers + sentiment and stats JSON API | KeyCORS |
| Mediastack | Free, Simple REST API for Live News & Blog Articles | Key |
| New York Times | The New York Times Developer Network | Key |
| News | Headlines currently published on a range of news sources and blogs | Key |
| NewsAgent Data | Russian & English news with urgency scoring, political-lean & event clustering | KeyCORS |
| NewsAPI.ai | News API access to real-time and archive news content | KeyCORS |
| NewsData | News data API for live-breaking news and headlines from reputed news sources | Key |
| NewsDataHub | NewsDataHub provides a production-ready REST API delivering near-real-time global news data at scale | KeyCORS |
| Newsflash | Deduplicated news events from 260+ sources with corroboration/confidence scores for AI agents | Key |
| NewsMesh | Access the news articles from trusted sources with real-time updates & powerful search capabilities | KeyCORS |
| NewsX | Get or Search Latest Breaking News with ML Powered Summaries 🤖 | Key |
| NPR One | Personalized news listening experience from NPR | OAuth |
| RiskSentinel | AI-powered news intelligence API delivering structured events with risk assessment, sentiment analysis, company impacts, geo tagging, ai generated summary and more | Key |
| Substack API Wrapper | Substack's newsletter platform now has an API wrapper, for easy access to latest posts | None |
| The Guardian | Access all the content the Guardian creates, categorised by tags and section | Key |
| The Old Reader | RSS reader | Key |
| TheNews | Aggregated headlines, top story and live news JSON API | KeyCORS |
| Trove | Search through the National Library of Australia collection of 1000s of digitised newspapers | Key |
| World News | Search through millions of semantically tagged worldwide news | KeyCORS |