Most Reliable Free Public APIs by Uptime
Updated July 2026 · measured from hourly automated checks
Uptime figures on this page come from our own infrastructure — we make an HTTP request to each API's health endpoint every hour and record the result. No self-reported status pages, no marketing numbers. The 30-day average is computed from daily rollups, giving you a realistic picture of what developers actually experience. Of 103 active APIs we track, 103 have enough data for a 30-day average.
- #1 Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) 🟢 Online geocoding 100% 30-day uptime · 857 ms
Free forward and reverse geocoding from OpenStreetMap data. Rate-limited.
1 req/sec, must set User-Agent, no key
- #2 Weatherstack 🟢 Online weather 100% 30-day uptime · 268 ms
Real-time and historical weather data API powered by worldwide weather stations with JSON and XML output.
100 calls/month, free key, no credit card
- #3 Bright Sky (DWD) 🟢 Online weather 100% 30-day uptime · 887 ms
Open weather API built on German Weather Service (DWD) data covering all of Germany with no key required.
Unlimited, no key, no credit card
- #4 NOAA National Weather Service 🟢 Online weather 100% 30-day uptime · 16 ms
Official US government weather API providing forecasts, alerts, and observations for US locations. No key required.
Unlimited (US only), no key, no credit card
- #5 Open-Meteo Air Quality 🟢 Online weather 100% 30-day uptime · 873 ms
Free air quality forecast API providing PM2.5, PM10, ozone, and other pollutant data worldwide. No key required.
10,000 calls/day, no key, no credit card
- #6 Hacker News API 🟢 Online news 100% 30-day uptime · 298 ms
Official Firebase-based Hacker News API providing real-time access to stories, comments, jobs, and user data.
Unlimited, no key, no credit card
- #7 Wikipedia REST API 🟢 Online news 100% 30-day uptime · 355 ms
Official Wikipedia API for retrieving article summaries, full text, featured content, and on-this-day events.
Unlimited, no key, must set User-Agent
- #8 DEV Community API 🟢 Online news 100% 30-day uptime · 315 ms
Official API for DEV.to providing access to articles, tags, and user profiles from the developer community platform.
30 calls/30s unauthenticated, no key for reads
- #9 Alpha Vantage 🟢 Online finance 100% 30-day uptime · 450 ms
Stock market, forex, and cryptocurrency data API with 20+ years of historical data and real-time quotes.
25 calls/day, free key, no credit card
- #10 Twelve Data 🟢 Online finance 100% 30-day uptime · 1710 ms
Financial market data API covering stocks, forex, ETFs, and mutual funds with real-time and historical data.
800 calls/day, free key, no credit card
Frequently Asked Questions
What does 99.9% uptime mean in practice?
99.9% uptime (often called 'three nines') means the service is unavailable for roughly 8.7 hours per year, or about 43 minutes per month. For context: 99.0% is ~87 hours/year of downtime; 99.5% is ~44 hours/year. For a free API that you're using in a hobby project, 99% is fine. For a production service where downtime directly costs money, you want 99.9%+ and ideally an SLA from a paid tier. The values on this page come from our own hourly checks — we measure actual availability, not provider-reported figures.
How do you measure API uptime?
We make an HTTP request to each API's health endpoint every hour, 24/7. We record whether the request succeeded (expected status code within a timeout), and the response time in milliseconds. Each day's 24 checks are rolled up into a daily uptime percentage. The 30-day average you see on this page is the mean of those daily rollups. We don't rely on self-reported status pages — we measure from our infrastructure so you see what developers actually experience, not what the provider claims.
Why do some APIs on this list show 'collecting…' for uptime?
We recently added some APIs to tracking, and 30 days of data hasn't accumulated yet. For a brand-new entry we have fewer than 30 daily rollups, so we show 'collecting…' rather than a misleadingly small sample. Give it a few weeks and the full 30-day history will appear. In the meantime, you can see the live status badge (current hourly check result) and any recent events on the API's detail page.
Should I pick the API with the highest uptime, or does other data matter?
Uptime is the most important single factor for production use, but it's not the whole picture. A 99.9% uptime API with a 2,000 ms response time might be worse for user-facing features than a 99.5% API that responds in 80 ms. Similarly, a generous free tier (no key, high call limits) lowers integration cost. Our composite score on category pages weights uptime at 60%, speed at 30%, and free-tier quality at 10% — that's a reasonable starting point. For latency-sensitive apps, sort by response time instead.