40+ Awesome Free APIs to Inspire Your Next Project

Third-party APIs have become immensely valuable for quickly adding functionality to applications today. They have opened the doors for developers to access large amounts of data from different domains. Owing to APIs, it only takes us the roundtrip of an HTTP request to start benefiting from the power of such data and build amazing apps that cater to different user needs.

When working on personal or hobby projects, APIs are something developers can’t live without. It’s often the free and public APIs that inspire and enable us to add sophisticated functionality to apps in such instances. So, if you’re in search of such inspiration at the moment to help with your next project, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we bring you a curated list of over 40 free APIs for you to test and try out in your future projects when the motivation strikes.

While some of the APIs in this list are entirely free regardless of the request count, many have limitations on the number of requests you can send per day or month under the free tier. But they will probably be more than enough when working on a hobby project or testing an API. Also, it’s important to note that most APIs listed here require API keys to query their endpoints.

Geo Data

GeoDB Cities

GeoDB Cities is an online cities database with GraphQL and REST API support. You offer the following functionality to users through different endpoints.

• Find cities by name, country, location, timezone, or population.
• Display results in multiple languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish)
• Sort results by name, country code, elevation, and population.
• Get all country regions, states, and provinces.
• Get all countries supporting a currency.

IP Geo API

IP Geo API provides details on the Geo Location of a user based on the IP address, with support for both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols. The information it provides includes the user’s country, city, latitude and longitude, and timezone.

Google Maps Geocoding

Geocoding refers to converting a human-readable address (e.g., 12, Main Road, Colombo) into geographical coordinates with latitudes and longitudes. Google Maps Geocoding API supports geocoding as well as reverse geocoding with its endpoints.

Cartes.io Cartes.io allows you to create, edit, view, and delete maps and markers. You can also add markers in bulk to a map through the API.

OnWater

This is an API for determining whether a certain geographical point (represented by a latitude, longitude pair) is located on water or not. When you send the coordinates of the point to the API, it simply responds true if the point is located on water and false otherwise.

Food and Drinks

Tasty

Tasty API provides users access to the data stored on the popular food website, tasty.co . It comes with endpoints that allow users to retrieve lists of recipes, details of and single recipe, lists of available tags, or lists of similar recipes to a given recipe, among other recipe-related functionality.

Recipe-Food-Nutrition

This API provides access to a database of over 365,000 recipes and 86,000 food products. It supports natural language search terms such as “low calory recipes.” It also offers nutritional information on recipes. In addition to these features, it provides endpoints to calculate recipe costs, find recipes based on available ingredients, convert ingredient amounts, or classify recipes into cuisines.

Open Brewery DB

Open Brewery DB opens access to a free dataset with public information on breweries, cideries, brewpubs, and bottleshops. It can retrieve lists of breweries based on cities, types, or distance from a given location. It also supports search and autocomplete features when looking for brewery information.

Chomp

Chomp is an API for accessing information on over 875000 grocery products, branded foods, and raw ingredients in the United States and other countries worldwide. It allows you to retrieve food details using their barcode, name, or other search parameters. You can also get food ingredients, search recipes using titles or available ingredients, or find a random list of popular recipes through the API.

Foodish

Foodish provides pictures of random dishes to use as placeholders or for other purposes on your application.

Sports

API-NBA

This API allows users to access all NBA stats, game details, live scores, current standings, team and player information, and season and league data through different endpoints.

Live Sports Odds

Live Sports Odds API provides data on sports betting-related odds from bookmakers worldwide. Currently, it covers sports leagues like NFL, MLB, EPL, and AFL, with functionality to deliver information on their live and upcoming games and sometimes completed games.

SportScore

SportScore is an API focused on multiple sports, including football, tennis, basketball, and ice hockey. It offers details on teams, team standings, players, coaches, starting lineups of upcoming games, odds, and odds histories, with real-time updates on live scores and game incidents like substitutions and cards.

CityBikes

CityBikes is a bike-sharing initiative popular in numerous countries around the world. The CityBikes API provides endpoints to search and retrieve information on such available networks at a given location.

Weather and Environment

Open Weather Map

Open Weather Map API allows you to retrieve weather data from any location on the earth. It supports various related functionality, including climate forecasts for up to 30 days, historical weather data for the previous five days, and searching weather data by city name.

WeatherAPI.com

WeatherAPI.com gives users access to real-time weather information, including forecasts and historical data, from around the world. It introduces additional functionality to the standard weather API with support for IP lookup, astronomy data, air quality data, and weather alerts.

BreezoMeter Pollen

Breezometer Pollen provides information regarding pollens for a given location, including pollen types, plants, and indexes. It can forecast the pollen index for five types of plants (ash, cottonwood, oak, pine, and hazel) for up to five days.

Cloverly

Cloverly API provides endpoints to estimate and calculate the impact of carbon-emitting and offsetting activities to help an entity control its carbon footprint.

Entertainment

Genius

genius.com is a platform that hosts a crowdsourced collection of information on songs, lyrics, and artists. Its API provides completely free access to this large database to search through music metadata, retrieve song lyrics, and view artist information such as their images and social media handles.

Utelly

Utelly is a platform that aggregates data from Video On Demand services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Hulu. You can use Utelly’s API to look up a movie or a TV show by name and discover the platforms the video is available on for a specific country. The API also supports searching movies or TV shows with their commonly-used identifiers, such as IMDB IDs.

Deezer API

Deezer API lets users access the music database of the popular Deezer platform to search through over 30 million soundtracks, retrieve information on albums and artists, and create playlists, among other functionality.

Marvel Comics API

Marvel Comics API exposes 70-plus years’ worth of data on Marvel comics to developers. It contains endpoints to directly access comics, comic series, creators, stories, and comic entities to build fun and creative applications for users’ entertainment.

Finance and Investment

Coinranking

Coinranking API provides access to real-time prices of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It also contains data on price histories, circulating supplies, exchanges, and project information for different types of coins to help build a complete cryptocurrency app.

Alpha Vantage

Alpha Vantage API gives you the latest data on stock, ETF, forex, cryptocurrency, and technical and economic indicators for building an investment-focused app.

ExchangeRate-API

ExchangeRate-API allows you to conduct currency conversions for 161 currencies used around the world using the latest exchange rates.

Portfolio optimizer

Portfolio Optimizer API conducts portfolio analysis using algorithms like modern portfolio theory. It provides metrics to optimize investment portfolios made of various financial assets like stocks, bonds, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies.

Text Analysis

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis API helps you determine whether a text, like a user comment, is negative or positive.

GrammarBot

GrammarBot API performs spelling and grammar chacking operations on text. The API returns potential errors and suggested corrections in JSON format to the users.

Personality Traits

Personality Traits API predicts a user’s decision-making style and values (or personality) through written text. It determines whether the author’s personality is emotional (relationship-oriented and empathetic) or rational (objective and pragmatic). You can use the insight gained through this API to provide more personalized services to users.

Tisane

Tisane API allows you to detect cyberbullying, hate speech, sexual harassment, and suicidal behavior via text belonging to nearly 30 languages.

Transportation and Travel

AeroDataBox

This API allows developers to retrieve information on flights and airports in real-time. It includes flight status, flight delays, flight schedules, airport schedules, airport delay indexes, airport statistics, and flight time between airports.

GraphHopper Directions API

GraphHopper Directions API supports routing and navigation-related tasks such as A-to-B route planning, turn-by-turn navigation, route optimization, and isochrone calculations.

Transitland

Transitland aggregates transit data from many sources and opens them to the world through its API. You can retrieve information on different feeds, routes, and schedules from the API to build transit applications.

AIS Hub

AIS Hub provides real-time data on marine and inland vessels equipped with the AIS tracking system. It contains endpoints to find all vessels situated in an area within a given boundary and search vessels using MMSI, among other features.

Fun

Dad Jokes

Dad Jokes API comes with an unlimited supply of dad jokes that you can retrieve randomly or through different search parameters.

Meme Generator

Meme Generator API allows you to create simple memes by submitting top and bottom sentences to add to a preloaded or user-uploaded image. The final meme is returned as a JPEG file by the API.

Quotel - Quotes

Quotel API lets you access over one million quotes from 30,000+ authors, scientists, celebrities, politicians, athletes, and other famous people from history. In addition to supporting random quote retrieval and quote search, the API comes with features like Quote of the Day and quote-filtering based on categories.

Open Trivia

Open Trivia API opens the doors to an extensive database of trivia questions belonging to different topics and categories.

Test Data

FakeAPI

FakeAPI provides developers access to a completely free collection of APIs to generate fake data for testing purposes. It allows you to create different types of data objects, such as books, addresses, products, companies, credit cards, and users. You can also create custom data types for more niche needs.

Binuhuo

Binhuo is also an API for generating random mock data for testing your applications. It supports a lot of domain-specific data types, like bank codes, SWIFT codes, web logs, credit card transactions, and IMEI numbers, while adhering to business rules and standards.

Messages

Messages API allows you to retrieve random messages belonging to a selected category. You can use it to test your chat or status-updating applications.

Now It’s Time to Start Building

In this post, we brought you over 40 free and public APIs to inspire or help your next project. If you’ve found at least one API that stirred your interest in this list, now is the time for you to start building your next amazing application with its help.

Anjalee Sudasinghe

I’m a software engineering student who loves web development. I also have a habit of automating everyday stuff with code. I’ve discovered I love writing about programming as much as actual programming.

I’m extremely lucky to join the Live Code Stream community as a writer and share my love for programming with others one article at a time.