Frequently asked questions
Is it really free, with no key?
Yes. Run this now, from anywhere, with no account:
curl "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?q=test&size=1"No key parameter, no header, no signup. There is one throttle — 20 requests per second per IP — and no daily or monthly quota behind it.
What is the catch?
Three, stated plainly. The window is 30 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?
New articles land every hour, typically within 90 minutes of being crawled. That is fresh, not real-time, and we say so. Every batch is published on snapshots with its timestamp, so you can measure the lag rather than trust a claim.
Why only 30 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?
Around 3,000 in a typical day, whatever our sources reached. Not a curated list, so coverage of any given publisher is broad but not guaranteed. See the live source breakdown.
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?
Not yet — it is the next thing we ship. Meanwhile there are ready-made tool definitions for OpenAI and Anthropic, plus /openapi.json for anything that consumes a schema.
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 20 requests per second?
Ask. If you are doing a bulk export there is a better way than 100,000 HTTP requests, and we would rather give it to you than watch you shard across IPs.
Do you track me?
No accounts, no cookies, no analytics scripts, no fingerprinting. Standard web server logs exist for operations. Privacy in full.
I am a publisher and I want my site removed.
Write to us and it is done, no argument. Details.
