Free News API vs GNews
GNews — The Best Real-Time News API for Developers — measured against freenewsapi.ai on 18 August 2026.
| GNews | freenewsapi.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 100 requests/day | no quota |
| API key | required | none |
| Keyless request returns | 400 You did not provide an API key |
200 results |
| Signup | required | none |
| Commercial use on free | forbidden on free | allowed |
| Full article text | paid tiers only | free for everyone |
| Entry price | from $10/mo | $0 |
| Time window | limited on free | rolling 30 days |
| MCP server | yes | on the roadmap |
llms.txt | yes | yes |
openapi.json | no | yes |
| Provenance fields | no | country_source, date_source |
| Claimed coverage | 71 countries, 41 languages | 90+ countries, 50+ languages, 3,000+ publishers |
What GNews is good at
The cheapest genuine entry point in the market at $10 a month, and one of
the few competitors already shipping an MCP server and an llms.txt —
they can see where this is going.
The free tier is 100 requests a day with commercial use forbidden, which makes it a trial rather than a tier. Article bodies are paid.
When to choose which
Choose GNews 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 gnews.io without a key and compare what you get.
