Frequently asked questions
Is it really free?
The Free plan is. Get a key and run this:
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $FNA_KEY" "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?q=test&size=1"The Free plan has 3,000 requests a month and 120 a minute. Keys are required from 1 November 2026.
What is the catch?
Three, stated plainly. The window is 90 days, not years. There is no SLA. And there is no sentiment analysis or entity extraction — competitors charge for those and we do not have them yet. The full list of where we lose.
Can I use it commercially?
Yes, with no upgrade and no permission needed. Note that NewsAPI.org and GNews forbid commercial use on their free tiers regardless of volume — check what you are agreeing to elsewhere.
Link back to the original article url when you show content to a person.
That is the publisher's work.
Where does the data come from?
Large-scale public news archives: bulk collections of already-crawled news pages, released continuously. We process each release and index the result. More on sources.
How fresh is it, and how can I verify that?
The corpus is updated continuously throughout the day. Each ingest batch is published on snapshots with its filename, article count and timestamp, while status and /health expose the live service state. You can therefore measure freshness yourself instead of relying on a marketing badge that says real-time.
Why only 90 days?
It is what fits in the space we can give this without it becoming a cost centre. The tradeoff bought you the free tier. If you need archive, buy archive — NewsData.io and Perigon have years of it.
Do I get the full article text?
Yes, with full_text=true, at no charge. Every competitor puts bodies behind
a paid tier. Bodies are large — check token costs
before you request a hundred of them.
Which publishers are covered?
The current index contains material from 25,000+ publishers, with several thousand active in a typical day. Coverage follows what the public archives and our feed readers captured; it is broad but not a guaranteed list for any individual outlet. Use the publisher directory and source breakdown to check a hostname before building around it.
Why is the country field sometimes wrong?
Because it is inferred, and we tell you how. country_source says whether it
came from a country-code domain (reliable), the publisher's own markup (reliable), a
locale tag (usually right) or an en-US template default (unreliable). For
country-level analysis add strict_country=true.
Full explanation.
Can I get results by relevance instead of date?
Yes: sort=relevance. The default is date because most callers
want the newest. Use sort=crawled when polling — publishers backdate
publication times, and crawl time never moves backwards.
How do I fetch a whole day?
Slice by time. The offset ceiling is 9,900 and a day holds about 110,000 articles. The loop is in pagination.
Is there an MCP server?
Yes. The server lives at /mcp and uses Streamable HTTP with your API key.
It exposes curated tools for news search, trends, publishers and markets, plus generated
tools from the OpenAPI schema. /mcp.json returns the machine-readable tool
catalogue, and the MCP guide shows client setup.
Do you have an SDK?
No, and you do not need one. It is four GET endpoints returning JSON. Any HTTP client in any language is the SDK. Examples in quickstart.
What if I need more than the Free plan?
See plans, or ask. If you are doing a bulk export there is a better way than 100,000 HTTP requests.
Do you track me?
We keep what running the service needs: your account, usage per key and server logs. No ad networks, no data brokers. Privacy in full.
I am a publisher and I want my site removed.
Write to us and it is done, no argument. Details.
