While many APIs are premium and provided at a price, there are some that you can integrate for free into your projects or Discord Server.
Here are some of the best free APIs that I know of, that offer useful features either completely for free or with a generous free tier that allows for experimentation before you have to upgrade to a paid tier.
1. Pokemon API
This is a full RESTful API linked to an extensive database detailing everything about the Pokémon main game series. They have covered everything from Pokémon to Berry Flavors.
This is a consumption-only API — only the HTTP GET method is available on resources.
No authentication is required to access this API, and all resources are fully open and available. Since the move to static hosting in November 2018, rate limiting has been removed entirely, but they still encourage you to limit the frequency of requests to limit our hosting costs.
Sample API End-Point (on the date of writing this blog)
https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/pokemon/ditto
2. Polygon.io
Institutional-grade stock data for your next big project.
Polygon is a financial data platform that provides both real-time and historical market data for Stocks, Options, Forex, and Crypto. With access to this information, developers, investors, and financial institutions can gain valuable insights and make informed decisions.
To access real-time and historical stock market data with Polygon you will need to first create an account and obtain an API key to authenticate your requests. You will need to install a few of their libraries as well
Sample Python Code (on the date of writing this blog)
pip install polygon-api-client
from polygon import RESTClient client = RESTClient(“POLYGON_API_KEY”) aggs = [] for a in client.list_aggs( "AAPL", 1, "minute", "2022-01-01", "2023-02-03", limit=50000, ): aggs.append(a) print(aggs)
3. api.nasa.gov
The NASA API portal!
The objective of this site is to make NASA data, including imagery, eminently accessible to application developers. This catalog focuses on broadly useful and user friendly APIs and does not hold every NASA API.
Limits are placed on the number of API requests you may make using your API key. Rate limits may vary by service, but the defaults are:
Hourly Limit: 1,000 requests per hour
Sample API End-Point (on the date of writing this blog)
# NASA Image and Video Library # Use this API to access the NASA Image and Video Library site at images.nasa.gov. GET https://images-api.nasa.gov GET /search?q={q}
4. restcountries.com
Get information about countries via a RESTful API!
This project is inspired on restcountries.eu by Fayder Florez. Although the original project has now moved to a subscription base API, this project is still Open Source and Free to use.
You can access API through https://restcountries.com/v3.1/all but in order to get a faster response, you should filter the results by the fields you need.
Sample API End-Point (on the date of writing this blog)
https://restcountries.com/v3.1/name/India?fullText=true
5. Weather API
Access current weather data, Forecast data for hourly to 30 days for any location.
They collect and process weather data from different sources such as global and local weather models, satellites, radars and a vast network of weather stations.
The data is available in JSON, XML, and HTML formats and allow 1,000 API calls per day for free.
You will however need to get an API Key cause they need it for any API call to their site.
Sample API End-Point (on the date of writing this blog)
http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?id=524901&appid={API key}
6. Random User Generator
Random user generator is a free, open source API for generating random user data. Like Lorem Ipsum, but for people.
At the time of writing this blog they allow 500 daily results with 10 results / request.
Sample Code (at the time of writing this blog)
// This is a comment that isn't evaluated /* Multiline comments work as well! */ const fullName = "Billy Builder"; // Not attached to api object var middleName = "The"; let age = 5; api.age = age; // Attached to api object api.phone = phoneNum(); // Calling user defined function function phoneNum(format) { format = format || "(xxx) xxx-xxxx"; return String(format).split('').map(digit => { return digit === 'x' ? random.numeric(0, 9) : digit; }).join(''); }
7. Spotify API
The Spotify Web API provides a wide range of functionality for developers, including:
- Retrieve data from your favourite artist, album or show.
- Search for Spotify content.
- Control and interact with the playback, play and resume, Seek to a position or retrieve your queue.
- Manage your personal library, by creating a new playlist and adding your favourite tracks to it.
- Get recommendations based on the music you listen the most.
8. Valorant API
Cause I love playing Valorant!
Valorant-api is the unofficial but extensive API containing data of most in-game items, assets, agents, player cards, game currency, map etc in multiple languages.
Sample API End-Point (on the date of writing this blog)
https://valorant-api.com/v1/agents
9. Security API
Be it your discord server or if you are writing a CLI. I find that these 2 specific API highly useful.
ipapi is an API to find very specific details about an IP address like city, country ASN, which organisation is providing the IP address etc.
The AbuseIPDB API allows you to utilize our database programmatically. This is most commonly done through Fail2Ban, which comes prepackaged with an AbuseIPDB configuration.
Sample API End-Point (on the date of writing this blog)
curl -G https://api.abuseipdb.com/api/v2/check \ --data-urlencode "ipAddress=118.25.6.39" \ -d maxAgeInDays=90 \ -d verbose \ -H "Key: YOUR_OWN_API_KEY" \ -H "Accept: application/json"
10. Jokes API
Jokes One joke API is a full featured jokes API that gives access to our jokes platform. You want to build an app or integrate humor into your workflow / applications you are in the right place.
Here are the full features of the API:
- Joke of the day on various categories
- Random Joke
- Search and retrieve Jokes based on categories query term etc
- Ability to retrive SFW jokes based on various flags such as dirty, racial etc
- Ability to store and retrieve private jokes
Some of their API calls are public. They ratelimit the number of API callsto 60 API calls a day with distribution of 5 calls an hour.
https://api.jokes.one
Other Notable Mentions
Audio DB API for all the metadata of artists, songs their career and tracks etc.
Google Translate API
Harry Potter Trivia API
Comic Book API: All details about comic books
Complete List Of All Anime DB
Geek Jokes
Conclusion
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