Free public APIs catalog
A curated list of 1000+ free, legal public APIs organized by category. Many require no auth.
Quick reference by category
Finance and crypto
CoinGecko, CoinCap, Alpha Vantage, Open Exchange Rates, FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)
News and media
NewsAPI, GNews, TheNewsAPI, MediaStack, New York Times API
- Headlines, RSS, aggregators, real-time sentiment
Weather and geolocation
- Open-Meteo — fully free, no API key required
- OpenWeatherMap, WeatherAPI, Visual Crossing
- Temperature, precipitation, forecasts, historical data for any coordinates
Sports
API-Football, TheSportsDB, PandaScore, ESPN API
- Results, team form, player stats, historical league data
ML and text analysis
Hugging Face Inference API, Cohere
- Classification, sentiment, summarization, embeddings — pre-trained models
Entertainment
TMDB (movies/TV), RAWG (games), MusicBrainz (music)
- Charts, ratings, metadata
Also available (in the full catalog)
Politics, law, health, science, transport, government open data
Evaluating APIs from the catalog
| Field | What to check | |-------|---------------| | Auth | "No" = no registration needed | | CORS | Matters for browser frontend, irrelevant for backend scripts | | Limits | Most free APIs have daily caps — usually enough for personal tools |
Weekend project ideas
- News alerts: NewsAPI + keyword filter + Telegram bot (2-3 hours)
- Sentiment signal: News feed + Hugging Face sentiment model + score -1 to +1
- Weather dashboard: Open-Meteo + historical data + forecast for target city
- Sports aggregator: Team form, injuries, home advantage in one view
Usage tip
For any new project needing external data: check this catalog first before assuming you need a paid API. Feed the full list to an agent and ask what's useful for the specific task — it will find connections you'd miss manually.
Attribution
Based on "1000+ Free APIs That Will Replace Your Paid Subscriptions" by @qwerty on X (Mar 10, 2026). Original thread catalogs free public APIs across finance, news, weather, sports, ML, entertainment, and more, with evaluation criteria and build ideas.