How we compare

Eleven news APIs, compared on the things that decide whether you can actually use them. Every figure below was read off the vendor's own site or measured by calling their API on 18 August 2026.

The test anyone can repeat

We called each API with no key at all. This is what came back:

Service	Response to a keyless request
newsapi.org	401 `apiKeyMissing`
gnews.io	400 `You did not provide an API key`
newsdata.io	401 `The API Key is missing`
thenewsapi.com	401 `invalid_api_token`
mediastack.com	401 `missing_access_key`
apitube.io	401 `ER0201`
worldnewsapi.com	401 `You are not authorized`
currentsapi.services	401 `Authentication required`
goperigon.com	401 `API key not found`
freenewsapi.io	401 `Missing API key`
freenewsapi.ai	200 results

bash

curl "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?q=test&size=1"          # 200, results\ncurl "https://newsapi.org/v2/everything?q=test"   # 401\ncurl "https://gnews.io/api/v4/search?q=test"      # 400

Feature matrix

Service	Free tier	API key	Commercial on free	Article text	MCP	llms.txt
freenewsapi.ai	unlimited	none	allowed	free	roadmap	yes
APITube	1,000 requests/day	required	allowed	included	yes	yes
NewsAPI.org	100 requests/day	required	forbidden on free	paid tiers only	no	no
GNews	100 requests/day	required	forbidden on free	paid tiers only	yes	yes
NewsData.io	limited trial	required	paid only	paid tiers only	no	yes
The News API	limited daily	required	allowed	paid tiers only	no	no
World News API	trial credits	required	paid	included on paid	yes	no
Mediastack	100 requests/month	required	paid only	paid tiers only	no	no
Currents API	250 requests/day	required	allowed	partial	no	yes
FreeNewsAPI.io	5,000 requests/day	required	allowed	included	no	no
NewsCatcher	6,000 requests/month	required	allowed	included	no	yes
Perigon	none published	required	enterprise	included	yes	yes

Free tiers, ranked

The category median is 100 requests a day. Here is the whole field:

Service	Free allowance	Key needed	Commercial use
freenewsapi.ai	no quota	no	allowed
freenewsapi.io	5,000 / day	yes	allowed
apitube.io	1,000 / day	yes	allowed
currentsapi.services	250 / day	yes	allowed
newsapi.org	100 / day	yes	forbidden
gnews.io	100 / day	yes	forbidden
newscatcherapi.com	6,000 / month	yes	allowed
mediastack.com	100 / month	yes	paid only
newsriver.io	100 / month	yes	allowed
worldnewsapi.com	trial credits	yes	paid
goperigon.com	not published	yes	enterprise

Where we lose

Being straight about this is more useful to you than a clean sweep, and you would find out anyway.

Archive depth. We hold 30 days. NewsData.io and Perigon hold years. If you need history, buy history.
Sentiment and entity extraction. APITube, Perigon, World News API and Webz ship these today. We do not, yet.
Story clustering. Perigon and APITube group the same event across publishers. We return the articles; deduplicating is on you for now.
Curated source lists. NewsAPI.org and Opoint know exactly which publishers they carry. Ours is whatever our archive sources reached — broader, but less predictable.
An SLA. There is no contract, no support line and no uptime guarantee. It is free.

Where we win

No key. The only one. An agent can start using it unattended.
No quota. 20 requests per second per IP, and no daily or monthly cap behind it.
Article bodies free. Everywhere else the full text is a paid feature, and full text is what retrieval-augmented generation actually needs.
Published provenance. country_source and date_source on every article. Nobody else tells you which values were guessed.
Published pipeline. Every ingest batch is public, so you can see exactly how fresh the data is instead of trusting a "real-time" badge.