Free News APIs Tested: Speed, Coverage, and Reliability

The Hacker News API is the most reliable free news source we monitor: 100% uptime in our data, unlimited requests, no key required. For tech-specific news, it's also the most useful. For general news, The Guardian Open Platform (500 calls/day, test key) provides full article text that most commercial news APIs lock behind paid tiers.

We track 13 news APIs on FreeAPI.watch. Here's what three months of hourly monitoring tells us.

Hacker News API: The Reliability Baseline

The Hacker News API runs on Google's Firebase infrastructure. It provides top stories, new stories, jobs, and Ask HN posts. The API is a list of item IDs — you then fetch each item individually, which means getting the top 30 stories requires 31 HTTP requests.

This design is unusual but there's a reason: the item endpoint is cacheable indefinitely (story data doesn't change much after posting), while the topstories list changes frequently. You can build an efficient client by caching individual items and only refreshing the topstories list.

What HN lacks: full article text (you get title and URL, not the article content), topic filtering, and anything outside the HN community's interests. See /hacker-news for live status.

The Guardian Open Platform: Best Free News API for Article Text

The Guardian is the only major publisher that provides full article text on the free API tier. With 500 calls/day and a test key that works without providing billing information, it's accessible and genuinely useful.

Key parameters: `show-fields=body` returns full article text, `section=technology` filters by section, `q=keyword` full-text searches. The API covers 2 million+ articles back to 1999.

The limitation is obvious: it's only The Guardian. If you need coverage from multiple outlets, you'll need multiple APIs or a paid aggregator. For UK news, analysis, and long-form journalism specifically, it's the best free source. See /the-guardian for status.

NewsData.io: 200 Calls/Day With Filters

NewsData.io (200 calls/day, key required, email signup) aggregates 50,000+ sources across 150+ countries. The free tier supports country filtering (`country=us`), language filtering (`language=en`), and category filtering (`category=technology`).

200 calls/day is enough for a personal news dashboard polling every 7 minutes. It's not enough for a production app with multiple users each triggering queries. The pagination system uses a `nextPage` token — our tutorial at /tutorial/newsdata covers this.

The data quality is mixed: with 50,000 sources, you get everything from major outlets to spam blogs. The API doesn't have a quality filter on the free tier. Plan to do your own filtering. See /newsdata for current status.

Spaceflight News API: Unlimited and Specific

Spaceflight News API aggregates articles, blogs, and launch reports from major space organisations: NASA, ESA, SpaceX, Roscosmos, Blue Origin, and specialist outlets. It's unlimited, no key, and specifically useful for the space/aerospace domain.

If you're building any application with a space angle — launch countdowns, satellite tracking, space news feed — this is a zero-cost, zero-friction data source. See /spaceflight-news for live status.

The Others: What to Know

GNews (100 calls/day, key) covers 60,000+ sources but the free tier is quite restrictive. Currents API (600 calls/day, key) has a more usable limit. New York Times API (500 calls/day, key) gives access to the NYT archive back to 1851 — unbeatable for historical research.

DEV Community API (30 calls/30s, no key for reads) is worth knowing for developer content specifically — it's the DEV.to platform, covering technical articles tagged by technology. Lobste.rs API (unlimited, no key) is similar to Hacker News but smaller and more curated.

Reddit JSON API (/reddit-json) rounds out the news options — not traditional news, but for community discussion of tech topics it's indispensable. Full ranking at /category/news.