Rate limits

There is no quota, no daily cap and no plan to upgrade to. There is one throttle, and it exists so that one caller cannot take the service away from everyone else.

The only limit

Exceeding the rate returns 429. Nothing is banned, nothing is counted against you, and the next second you are through again.

For context: 20 requests per second sustained is 1.7 million requests a day from a single IP. If you are hitting it, you are almost certainly doing a bulk sweep — see pagination for a cheaper shape.

Say who you are, and help keep it this way

Not a limit, and not a condition — a request. Send an X-Agent header naming your agent, the framework it runs through and the model driving it:

X-Agent: name=newsbot; version=1.4; framework=langchain/0.3; model=gpt-4o; contact=https://example.com/bot

Nothing is rejected or throttled without it. The reason to send it is that open APIs usually close because their operators cannot tell legitimate use from abuse, and this is the cheapest way to keep that from happening here. The full convention →

How much the cluster can take

Measured, not estimated: 1,247 requests per second at a 107 ms 99th percentile, with zero errors over 40,000 requests. The per-IP throttle is 1.6% of that, so the limit is about fairness between callers, not about capacity.

Why this is free

Because it costs us very little. The data comes from public news archives. Thirty days of it in triplicate occupies about 3% of a cluster we already run. The marginal cost of your query is CPU time we have spare.

That is the honest answer, and it is also the reason the offer is stable: we are not subsidising you out of a marketing budget that can be cut.

Fair use, in plain terms

• Do use it in production, in a commercial product, at whatever volume you need.
• Do cache. If your agent asks the same question ten times a minute, cache it for a minute — results only change hourly.
• Do link back to the original url when you show an article to a person. It is the publisher's work.
• Do not parallelise a full-corpus dump across dozens of IP addresses to sidestep the throttle. If you need bulk data, ask us — there is a better way to give it to you than 100,000 HTTP requests.

If limits ever change

Free keyless search stays free: it is the product, and it is in the domain name. If load ever forces a change, it will be optional keys for accounting and higher personal limits — never a paywall in front of the basic search. Any change is announced on the changelog first.