Free News API vs Currents API
Currents API — Free JSON News API for Developers — measured against freenewsapi.ai on 18 August 2026.
| Currents API | freenewsapi.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 250 requests/day | no quota |
| API key | required | none |
| Keyless request returns | 401 Authentication required |
200 results |
| Signup | required | none |
| Commercial use on free | allowed | allowed |
| Full article text | partial | free for everyone |
| Entry price | subscription | $0 |
| Time window | limited | rolling 30 days |
| MCP server | no | on the roadmap |
llms.txt | yes | yes |
openapi.json | no | yes |
| Provenance fields | no | country_source, date_source |
| Claimed coverage | 70 countries, 20 languages | 90+ countries, 50+ languages, 3,000+ publishers |
What Currents API is good at
250 requests a day free is above the category median of 100, and the API is straightforward.
Still a key, still a daily ceiling, and coverage of 20 languages is narrow next to the 50+ languages that turn up in an open crawl.
When to choose which
Choose Currents API if
You need a deeper archive than 30 days, ready-made sentiment or entity extraction, a curated and contractual source list, or a support agreement with a name on it. Paying for a product with a support desk is a legitimate choice.
Choose freenewsapi.ai if
An autonomous agent needs to call the API without a human registering first, you want article bodies without a paid tier, you need to know which metadata is inferred rather than observed, or you simply do not want a quota to plan around.
Try ours right now
No signup, no key, nothing to configure. Paste this:
curl "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?q=technology&date=today&size=5"Then run the same query against currentsapi.services without a key and compare what you get.
