The 8 best free news APIs in 2026

Oct 1, 2026

If your application needs to know what happened today, it needs a way to search or retrieve news programmatically.

A news API is a web service that collects articles from publishers and returns them as structured data. You send a query with keywords, a language, or a date range, and it returns matching articles.

We put together this guide of the best free news API providers for developers who are on a budget. The guide starts with Exa, a search API you can use for news inside an LLM app, which offers $10 in free usage every month. We also compare seven free feed APIs and two publisher APIs.

What a news API returns

Although field names and details vary by provider and plan, most news APIs return an array of article objects with the following core fields.

Headline. The article title, usually in a title field.
Article metadata. Common fields include a description or excerpt, author, language, country, category, and image URL. Some paid plans also provide sentiment or entity tags.
Full text. This field contains the article body. Most free plans omit it or provide only a short preview, so check its contents before relying on it.
Source. The publisher's name and domain, plus the article URL.
Timestamp. The publication time, in ISO 8601 format.

Beyond content limits, free plans also restrict how current the results are. Several delay new articles by 12 to 24 hours and search only the past 30 days.

Using a web search API for news

When an LLM uses news as one of several sources, it often needs only a few current passages that it can cite in an answer. A web search API can provide that format. You can write a plain-language query, limit it to a publication period, and receive relevant passages with source URLs. Exa's Search API supports this workflow through a news category and the start_published_date and end_published_date filters. New articles can become searchable within minutes of publication.

from exa_py import Exa

exa = Exa()  # reads EXA_API_KEY

results = exa.search(
    "EU AI Act enforcement actions against general-purpose model providers",
    category="news",
    start_published_date="2026-09-01T00:00:00.000Z",
    num_results=10,
    contents={"highlights": True},
)

for r in results.results:
    print(r.published_date, r.title, r.url)
    print(r.highlights)

Each result includes a title, URL, and publication date, while the highlights field contains passages from the page that match the query. These highlights can use up to 17 times fewer tokens than full-page text, reducing the amount of content the model must process.

Several filters help refine news searches. The publication-date filters exclude pages without a publication date, and include_domains limits results to trusted outlets, such as selected trade publications. You can also set maxAgeHours within contents to control how recently the page content must have been extracted.

Search costs $7 per 1,000 requests. The free tier includes $10 in credits every month, plus a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding.

7 free news feed APIs

NewsData.io provides 200 API credits per day, with up to 10 articles per credit. Free results have a 12-hour delay, and the free plan does not include the Archive endpoint. The free API permits commercial use. The Basic plan costs $199.99 per month and includes six months of history.
Currents provides 250 requests per day, up to 20 results per request, 30 days of history, and a 300-character text preview. The Builder plan costs $69 per month. The free plan permits commercial use with limits. Its terms allow internal analysis and linked displays, but customer-facing AI summaries and republished content require separate terms.
NewsAPI.org provides 100 requests per day on its Developer plan, with a 24-hour delay and up to one month of searchable history. The plan does not permit commercial use and is limited to development environments. Production access starts with the Business plan at $449 per month.
GNews provides 100 requests per day, up to 10 articles per request, a 12-hour delay, and 30 days of history. The free plan is limited to noncommercial projects. The Essential plan costs €49.99 per month and adds real-time articles and full content. Teams that outgrow the free plan can compare GNews alternatives.
Mediastack provides 100 calls per month with delayed data in 13 languages. Its free plan does not permit commercial use. The Standard plan costs $24.99 per month and includes commercial use.
TheNewsAPI provides 100 requests per day, with three articles per request and access to real-time and historical data. The Basic plan costs $19 per month. The API documentation does not state whether the free plan permits commercial use. The site's terms limit use to personal, noncommercial purposes unless approved, so confirm the terms before launching a product.
APITube provides 100 requests per day, 10 articles per request, a 12-hour delay, and a 200-character body preview. Free responses still include sentiment and entity tags. The free Developer plan does not permit commercial use and is limited to development environments.

Comparison table

The table summarizes each free plan as the vendor describes it on its pricing or terms page.

API	Free quota	Commercial use	Best for
Exa	$10 in credits a month, then $7 per 1,000 searches	Not stated	Cited news passages in an LLM app, searchable within minutes of publication
NewsData.io	200 credits a day	Yes	Prototypes headed to production
Currents	250 requests a day	Yes, internal use and linked display	Internal monitoring and alerts
NewsAPI.org	100 requests a day	No, development only	Testing before a paid plan
GNews	100 requests a day	No	Non-commercial side projects
Mediastack	100 calls a month	No	A quick evaluation
TheNewsAPI	100 requests a day	Not stated	Small hobby apps
APITube	100 requests a day	No, development only	Testing its NLP tags and filters

Single-publisher news APIs

News feed APIs are not the only options. Two major publishers operate their own APIs. The New York Times offers Article Search, Top Stories, and other APIs free for noncommercial use, with limits of 500 requests per day and five per minute. The Guardian Open Platform provides a free developer key with 500 calls per day and access to article text, also for noncommercial use. Both publishers sell commercial licenses separately.

Open-source news libraries

Open-source libraries provide another alternative and avoid API keys entirely. pygooglenews wraps the Google News RSS feed, allowing you to retrieve top stories, topics, and search results with a few lines of code. newscatcher reads RSS feeds from thousands of news sites and returns normalized articles. Both use the MIT License. pygooglenews was last updated in December 2024, while newscatcher was last updated in October 2020, so either library may break if its source feeds change.

Monitoring news with scheduled searches

Even with current results, polling a news API every hour often returns the same articles and forces your code to remove duplicates. A scheduled search can avoid that work by returning only new results.

Exa Monitors automate this process by running searches on a schedule you choose, such as once per day. During each run, Exa applies time filters, removes results that the monitor previously returned, and sends new results to your webhook.

You can add an output schema so each delivery arrives as structured JSON, with sources stored in a separate grounding field. Monitors cost $15 per 1,000 requests and can track competitor launches, funding rounds, or regulatory changes in a market.

FAQ

Is there a completely free news API for commercial use?

NewsData.io permits commercial use on its free plan. Currents allows internal commercial use if you link to the original sources. NewsAPI.org, GNews, Mediastack, and APITube limit their free plans to noncommercial projects or development environments.

Which free news API has full article text?

None of the seven free news feed plans in this guide provide full article text. Currents offers a 300-character preview, while APITube offers a 200-character preview. If an LLM needs page content, a search API with highlights or text extraction can retrieve it from the source page.

How do I get only today's news?

Set a start date in the request. GNews and NewsAPI.org use the from parameter, while Exa uses start_published_date. Several free plans delay articles by 12 to 24 hours. For stories published within the past few hours, use real-time paid access or a search API.