Free News API vs Mediastack
Mediastack — Live News API for Global Coverage & Blog Articles — measured against freenewsapi.ai on 18 August 2026.
| Mediastack | freenewsapi.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 100 requests/month | no quota |
| API key | required | none |
| Keyless request returns | 401 missing_access_key |
200 results |
| Signup | required | none |
| Commercial use on free | paid only | allowed |
| Full article text | paid tiers only | free for everyone |
| Entry price | from $22/mo | $0 |
| Time window | paid | rolling 30 days |
| MCP server | no | on the roadmap |
llms.txt | no | yes |
openapi.json | no | yes |
| Provenance fields | no | country_source, date_source |
| Claimed coverage | 50 countries, 13 languages | 90+ countries, 50+ languages, 3,000+ publishers |
What Mediastack is good at
Part of the apilayer family, so the billing, dashboard and support are more polished than the average competitor here.
The free tier is 100 requests per month — three a day. That is a demo button, not a tier. Free requests are also HTTP-only, which rules them out of any browser context.
When to choose which
Choose Mediastack 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 mediastack.com without a key and compare what you get.
