A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily | Hacker News Reader

A Collection of Free Public APIs That Is Tested Daily

freepublicapis.com

602 pointsabhas9122 comments

The key here is tested daily. The last time I wanted some sample data api it took me way too long to find one because all the ones that were recommended to me were deprecated. It's really tough to keep a free api up, because there's no incentives. You can't sell ads on it.

> You can't sell ads on it.

Maybe you could! Perhaps a sample data API that creates users like "John Chocolate Oreos," address "100 Pack Street", age 19.99, email "visit<at>oreo.com"

I don’t think Oreo would want to commit ad spend to that—it would perform worse than the display network, and worse than the Outbrain/Taboolas of the world.

I get the feeling arjvik's comment was meant to be sarcasm.

(This doesn't apply to every API in the list, but) having made the mistake of using a public API (that later went offline) for examples in a book of mine, never again.

These days I keep an API deployed on a subdomain I control.

  > having made the mistake of using a public API (that later went offline) for examples in a book of mine

Literally a tale as old as time. The Old Testament references a command from God, that is not contained in the Old Testament itself.

Do you have an example for this? Just curious

Not sure which specific example they're referring to, but another example is that, according to tradition, the prophet Isaiah was martyred by placing him inside a hollow tree that was then sawn down. This appears to be referenced by the Apostle Paul in Hebrews 11:37 even though there is no description of Isaiah's death in the Old Testament:

"They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented;"

That explains Mel Brooks' 5 missing commandments. Where's the undef ref?

Not literally a tale as old as time. Time existed for billions of years before humans.

A tale as old as tales, then.

The possibility of an internet resource disappearing exists regardless of the resource type. Running an API Forwarder that could act as a common target for all your APIs might work. Give it the request, and it passes it on, records success, optionally sends a notification if an endpoint that previously succeeded is now failing.

Add a fancy feature of redirection with format changing to handle replacing dead APIs with new ones transparently.

If anybody makes one of these, they should totally make it a free public API. I'd use it, and I'm not certain if that would just be ironically.

  > Running an API Forwarder that could act as a common target for all your APIs might work.

That just sounds like adding another point of failure into the chain.

I'd say it only makes sense if you control the forwarder.

But it's one that you can fix.

Maybe we can convince IANA to host a simple API, on example.com as well.

I’ve seen books reference internet archive.

I did a similar deep dive to find all the specifically Music-related APIs that are available a few years ago. I've since moved on to other projects but maybe someone will find it useful / maybe OP can add the entries in my list to FreePublicAPIs.com!

https://docs.sweeting.me/s/music-apis

I'm not OP but I am the dude who made freepublicapis.com. Will check it out for sure, thank you so much!

I'm glad to see https://isevenapi.xyz/ made the list.

I love their pricing options include larger ranges of numbers, and enterprise class also includes negative numbers. ha ha.

Best part is that 'sign up' links to https://archive.org/donate/

I think their ad placement is even better than their pricing.

API Result:

GET https://api.isevenapi.xyz/api/iseven/6/

{"ad":"Buy isEvenCoin, the hottest new cryptocurrency!","iseven":true}

    {"ad":"Looking for someone to do yard work. Must have a hoolahoop. 760-555-7562","iseven":true}
    {"ad":"FOR SALE - collection of old people call 253-555-7212","iseven":true}
    {"ad":"Auto Repair Service: Free pick-up and delivery. Try us once, you'll never go anywhere again. Email dave57@qotmail.com","iseven":true}

    $ curl https://api.isevenapi.xyz/api/iseven/9999999
    {"error":"Number out of range. Upgrade to isEven API Premium or Enterprise."}

    $ curl https://api.isevenapi.xyz/api/iseven/2e21
    {"error":"what is this I don't even"}

What I really want is isoddapi.xyz.

Just like the npm package, all it should do is call isevenapi.xyz and invert the result.

I'd like to see isfizzbuzz.xyz.

Ideally, before 11:30 AM ET this Friday.

https://api.isfizzbuzz.xyz/

Cheers!

Awesome but seem to fail on some numbers e.g.

https://api.isfizzbuzz.xyz/api/15000000000000000000000000000...

BTW, there are neat divisibility rules which can give you the answer in practically linear time when the number is in decimal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisibility_rule

Clever! I found another simple alternative though.

The error response telling me to upgrade to a paid plan isn't in json.

Also, I broke something, maybe in the caching logic. I tried 99999999 then 999999 then 99999 and down, and now I'm currently getting.

    ~$ curl https://api.isfizzbuzz.xyz/api/9
    Invalid number. Please upgrade to a paid plan to use imaginary, non-real, or non-numeric numbers.

also fails on 8.

Whoops, fixed and fixed! And regression tests added.

I had made a silly, silly mistake when I went to restrict numbers longer than 7 digits from the "free plan", I had at the same time disallowed digits larger than 7 as being "valid digits", so anything with an 8 or a 9 had been "invalid".

so many coding interviews will change forever

Putting the 'micro' into microservices one bit of logic at-a-time :)

And then isevenapi.xyz should call isoddapi.xyz and invert the result to offload all the work to them.

isprimeapi.xyz would be helpful.

Just made it, enjoy :) https://api.isprimeapi.xyz/api/isprime/7

I hope someone sets up isthirteenapi.xyz.

I Seven API vs is Even API. Can't say I saw it the right way at first.

that makes me want to make an is seven API.

I feel like one of the categories they are missing is 'APIs that can be done in one line of JavaScript"

I'm not saying these shouldn't exist, I think they're pretty funny, but everything in its place.

These come in handy in an instructional context—being able to have a simple predictable API that you can point students at so they can learn how to call an API and process its data.

This made my day..

But what do I do if I need to know if a number is odd?

Launch a startup!

> If a number isn't even, you can easily tell that it's odd.

Yeah that's a hole in the market, I'm stealing it

It was the first one I searched for. What a silly tool: Parity as a Service.

Not having a free public API for this site is a bit of a joke.

It would never load due to infinite recursion.

What's the use case?

Examples page for an app that generates an app given any API

a syndication feed would probably suffice

this is now implemented: https://www.freepublicapis.com/api

I keep this list bookmarked: https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis Sadly they are missing health checks.

Paraphrasing a known saying, "there's no API, it's just someone else's computer".

I wish programmers would internalize this. They often seem to take APIs uncritically, not questioning whose resources they're using and where does the data come from as well as its quality beyond obvious cases. APIs are leaky abstractions as all abstractions are.

API doesn't mean someone's else's computer.

But all the APIs in this collection of free public APIs are on someone else's computer.

Hence testing them daily to see if the someone else is still offering them.

> APIs are leaky abstractions as all abstractions are.

Not all abstractions are leaky. Not at all.

Do you have any favorite non-leaky abstractions?

APIs can be hosted locally. In fact, I think most of them are.

That’s “there’s no cloud”. Of course there are APIs.

All of the API titles have been replaced by emojis () for me. Is this a bug or is it intentional?

Same here. (U+1F979 Face Holding Back Tears)

same

I like this, not only does it let people find the APIs but having a collection like this encourages others to make APIs and to keep them running.

There's not a lot of incentive to create a service if you feel like no-one will ever know about it. I have had a few thoughts for services that I might have developed if I thought anyone would ever see it.

There's probably an argument for sponsorship here as well, not as a vehicle for advertising, but just companies paying for (or supplying resources) to cover the ongoing costs of the service as a public good. I wish I could make something that worked and could put it somewhere and commit zero mindspace to billing, server maintenance etc. and just have it keep running, forever.

No right click -> New tab / Middle click is a killer in 2024.

this is now fixed

> Free IP Geolocation API - lookup any IP address. Provides geolocation data based on the input IPv4/IPv6 address or domain name

Where does one get a geo location for an IP address from?

In this particular case they seem to pull from https://www.maxmind.com/en/home

There's a bunch of IP/GPS and physical address lookup sites, services, and databases out there.

IPFire Location is nice too: https://www.ipfire.org/location/how-to-use

Whatever happened to programmable web?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProgrammableWeb - "was an..."

Bummer.

On February 3, 2023 Mulesoft announced that after 17 years in operation, it had shut down Programmable Web.

Honestly, Web3 is partially it now. If you remove the hype and buzzwords, you are left with a bunch of individually addressable contracts that can all be composed and integrated together seamlessly under a single web frontend.

I remember years ago doing something as simple as getting a coin onto an alt-chain was a 20 step process. Get the gas coin on the target chain, find the right contract address, bridge the assets over, do a bunch of conversions, finally to get the token on the chain I wanted.

These days its a single click. Different tools or companies have sprung up, and while they use the same exact contracts I would have manually interacted with before, they script them all together into one transaction to save time and gas fees. A simple UI to select destination chain and coin and it handles all the swaps, gas, bridging, etc needed.

You don't need permission and a lot of standards have developed to keep things running smooth.

It's not just coins and crypto either. No reason not to develop other things off the chain too.

I've been working on my own PIM (personal information management) suite and using web3 has been amazing. No need to worry about a server or a database. Just deploy my code to the chain and store all my data encrypted on chain as well. The altchains are extremely cheap and this storage is already backed up, replicated, distributed, and can be local with a self-ran node. I will never lose it and I can bootstrap my data from scratch anywhere in the world as long as I can sync the chain or reach an API. I have todo lists, notes, contact management, and more in the pipeline and I've never felt so safe about my infrastructure or data before.

Using Hugo to make a read-only API would be a great way to make an always-up API with minimal maintenance. Host on any static site host.

- https://web.archive.org/web/20180530151717/https://forestry....

- https://web.archive.org/web/20180525154607/https://forestry....

Tangentially, what APIs do you guys actually pay for? (Personally or through work)

Algo trading requires expensive APIs that fetch almost realtime bids. There are platforms that provide UPSI as APIs, which these traders use.

AWS is arguably an API, and I shovel a ton of money their way. Stripe is another one, though that ends with me getting paid, so I guess that technically doesn't count unless I start losing money using it. There's also the APIs backing all the apps I pay for, since I don't talk to them via a webpage. But then, if we look at every web page that hits an API to get a list of items to display, instead of that list coming over on the html itself, that'd be an API, technically. ChatGPT is an API I hit a bunch via non-web browser clients that I pay for.

easypost and taxjar

I'm relieved to know the Rick and Morty API is in such good health.

I don't really understand why one would build an HTTP API for this. I can't imagine the database being more than a few megabytes, the whole thing could probably be served as a JSON file.

I assume it's intended to be used in an educational context. Learning how to work with a simple API is more fun that way.

The last category on the left sidebar is "FHGR", which I'm guessing stands for Fachhochschule Graubünden, and indeed under IM2 we find:

> APIs handpicked by the University of Applied Sciences of Grisons for their IM2 JavaScript programming course...

That explains why there’s so many Swiss APIs.

Small nitpick: How does this calculate the health score shown? I see a vague description in the about page, but I'm confused by the weights. For example the Guild Wars 2 API shows 95 prevent, but clicking for details shows 100 percent reliability. Perhaps it's the high latency that drops it's score by 5 percent?

This is really great overall. I like the interface on mobile, and search works great for me so far. Bookmarking for later.

I think most of these would be better off as files

Most of them are useless play apis, but it's a fun dataset maybe. Also I guess most don't use the OpenAPI standard.

Odd layout. After entering a search in the text field, the next element is a title: “Search for an API” and a subheading: “Searching for APIs…”. The results were below the fold on my phone. This title made me think the query was not yet submitted, so I’m sure I submitted the form a bunch of times.

Wanted to add AISstream but didn't work. Does it accept websocket APIs? wss://stream.aisstream.io/v0/stream https://aisstream.io/documentation

Anyone know of a decent (doesn't have to be realtime) stock API for stocks? I didn't find any under the finance category besides one crypto related.

for basic high-low-open-close daily data, I like yfinance for daily data and polygon.io for minute by minute data

Very cool site and a good reminder that we need more common/shared infrastructure like that.

One nitpick: why can I not open like KS to API sub-pages in a new tab? Are Hyperlinks unfashionable now?

This site is very slow when accessed from Asia. And I can't open each card in a new tab. Slow server and/or bad Nuxt implementation?

>And I can't open each card in a new tab.

Design flaw, sadly. Also very annoyed by this.

An API for polling data would be cool, one can dream

Not so much for polling data, but some governments do allow access to coarse election data.

Australia's was enough that the unfortunately complicated math of their election system was repeatable and verifiable (Can't find the post about it, however)

Good point. However, in my experience messing around with choropleth maps, I often find myself resorting to web scraping in the end when I want something more current (opinion polling). Despite this data being seemingly everywhere, and companies often wanting you to use it (with attribution) so they can get advertising for other services, they never seem to have an API.

Polling is a fool's errand, in my experience, since I'd guess a ton of the "how about now?" responses are "nope"

IMHO sitemap.xml and/or ActivityPub are sleeper approaches to helping the sites with the adversarial relationship they have with scrapers. In my experience, there are two schools of thought: play the very expensive game of cat and mouse (expensive for BOTH sides) of trying to verify the human-ness of visitors, or make it so the inevitable bots don't eat up very expensive and valuable resources that can be spent serving actual humans

Imagine how much less nonsense would have to go on if Amazon had ActivityPub that CamelCamelCamel could subscribe to, or similar for Craigslist

I'm not saying "all information wants to be free," so if Amazon wants to focus its energies on hoarding the review content, since that's arguably its moat, fantastic - let the bot and anti-bot people war over that content, instead of arguably factual data found on the product listing pages

Maybe there is a language issue here. In Australia, a full on election is also called a poll. The government electoral commission does the polling, the voters do the voting.

I think you getting confused with opinion polling.

Ah, that's quite possible - since it was a thread about APIs, I interpreted the question as "a way to programmatically await data arrival" - the verb "polling" in API context is repeatedly invoking a status endpoint to ask if new information is available either in absolute terms or in terms of since the last request

I stand by my rant :-D but obviously stand corrected on the question being asked

What do you mean?

"Polling" as in "voting", not "polling" as in "fetching". Doh!

Regarding APIs, what is a recommend good and free tool, other than Postman, that allows for importing and exporting of saved collections?

I just recently (today) started using Bruno, seems pretty good so far. I like that it has a flat file structure that can be included in a git repo.

Looks like a winner! Thanks.

I’ve always liked Insomnia

Great resource, with a nice UI (Love to know how it's built).

Found public resources I always wished existed.

glad to hear it! I built it using nuxtjs and tailwindcss

Me likes, however the first API I looked for was not found. USPS address verification

This is great - bookmarked!

I tried to build something years ago on a similar foundation, and I found maintaining the API list to be impossible as a solo dev. In a pool of say 30 APIs, at least one would break their "contract" as a public resource daily. Shifting endpoints, revoked public tokens, changing outputs.

I was quite disappointed because I loved the product, a dashboard for arbitrary live data sourced from APIs, but the cost of maintaining it was too high.

I would say that would be my use case for LLMs. These should be easily fixed by automation that can reason about documentation and could spit out code fixes.

Of course I assume there is documentation that is updated before new changes go live which might be too much to ask :)

It's interesting engineering problem, I wouldn't imagine LLMs as they currently are could work directly on the whole codebase without breaking it just as often as the APIs. But perhaps you could have it maintain connectors/interfaces for each individual API, such that it can get one very wrong and not ruin the whole program.

You could even have its success depend on a test suite, so that it iterates until the tests pass.

For “API list” that only has tests to be fixed, something like shifting endpoint should be fixable with tests + LLM.

So that’s the idea I proposed that single dev with automation and LLM should be able to maintain “API list” but maintaining any code that depends on the API I expect is above LLMs.

Just a friendly reminder that rubygems.org's APIs are free/public: https://guides.rubygems.org/rubygems-org-api/

And there's a weekly data dump of our database: https://rubygems.org/pages/data

less is more get rid of the joke ones

"are" tested daily.

Not to QC the link title, but ;)

I had exactly the same thought at first but then realised they're referring to the collection rather than the APIs. Therefore singular is correct.

Ah! You are right!

https://rapidapi.com/hub

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