---
title: "The best news APIs in 2026: free and paid, compared"
category: "comparisons"
url: https://keirolabs.cloud/blog/best-news-api
---

## The 60-second version

**For most projects the best news API is NewsAPI.org or GNews for structured, filterable articles, and Google News RSS if you only need headlines and can live without an official API.** The catch with every free tier is the same: they are development-only or non-commercial, and the paid jump is steep (NewsAPI.org goes from $0 to $449 a month).

- **Best free start:** GNews (100 requests a day, non-commercial) or NewsAPI.org's Developer plan (100 a day, 24-hour delay, development only).
- **Best paid value:** GNews Essential at €49.99 a month, with full article content and commercial use.
- **Best at scale:** NewsAPI.org Business ($449 for 250,000 requests) or Advanced ($1,749 for 2 million).
- **Free headlines, no key:** Google News RSS search feeds. They are unofficial and have no SLA.
- **Gone:** the Google News Search API (switched off in 2016) and Bing News Search (retired August 11, 2025).

Prices were read from each vendor's pricing page on October 19, 2026.

## News APIs compared

| API | Free tier | Paid from | Full article text | History | Commercial use on free |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsAPI.org | 100 req/day, 24h delay, 1 month back | $449/mo (250k req) | No (snippet) | Up to 5 years on paid | No (dev only) |
| GNews | 100 req/day, 10 articles each, 30 days back | €49.99/mo (1,000 req/day) | Yes on paid | From 2020 on paid | No |
| Google News RSS | Unlimited, unofficial | — | No (headline + source) | Recent only | Check Google's terms |
| SerpApi (Google News engine) | 250 searches/mo | $25/mo | No | What Google shows | Yes |
| Brave Search API (news) | $5 credit/mo | $5 per 1,000 | No | Recent | Yes, within plan terms |
| Hacker News API | Free, no key | — | Story text and comments | Full archive | Yes |

Sources: [NewsAPI.org pricing](https://newsapi.org/pricing), [GNews pricing](https://gnews.io/pricing), [SerpApi pricing](/blog/serpapi-pricing), [Brave Search API](https://brave.com/search/api/).

## NewsAPI.org: the default, with a $449 cliff

**NewsAPI.org is the most-used news API, and its free plan is for development only.** The Developer plan gives 100 requests a day, articles delayed by 24 hours, search up to a month back, and CORS only for localhost. You may not use it in staging or production.

| Plan | Price | Requests | Delay | History |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | $0 | 100/day | 24 hours | 1 month |
| Business | $449/mo | 250,000/mo, then $0.0018 each | Real-time | 5 years |
| Advanced | $1,749/mo | 2,000,000/mo, then $0.0009 each | Real-time | 5 years, 99.95% SLA |

Yearly billing takes 20% off. **The gap between free and $449 is the problem.** A side project that outgrows 100 requests a day has no middle tier.

## GNews: full articles at a small-team price

**GNews is the value pick: €49.99 a month buys 1,000 requests a day, 25 articles per request, full article content and commercial use.**

| Plan | Price/mo | Requests/day | Articles/request | Full content | Commercial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | €0 | 100 | 10 | No (truncated) | No |
| Essential | €49.99 | 1,000 | 25 | Yes | Yes |
| Business | €99.99 | 5,000 | 50 | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise | €249.99 | 25,000 | 100 | Yes | Yes |

Yearly billing takes 20% off (Essential €39.99 a month). History on paid plans goes back to 2020.

## Google News: is there an API?

**No. Google's News Search API was deprecated in May 2011 and stopped working in February 2016.** What people use today are the RSS search feeds, which still work:

```
https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=nvidia+earnings&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
```

On October 19, 2026 that feed returned 100 items, each with a title, a `news.google.com` redirect link and a publish date. There is no key, no SLA and no published rate limit. Our [Google News API guide](/blog/google-news-api) covers the RSS parameters, the redirect-link problem and the paid alternatives.

## Free news APIs: what you can actually ship

**Every free news tier here is either development-only, non-commercial or unofficial.**

- **NewsAPI.org Developer:** development only, 24-hour delay.
- **GNews Free:** non-commercial, truncated content.
- **Google News RSS:** unofficial, no guarantees.
- **Hacker News API:** genuinely free and commercial-friendly, but it only covers Hacker News. The official API lives at `hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0` (items, top and new stories, no key), and Algolia runs a free full-text search API over the archive.

If you need a production-grade free start, the realistic path is GNews Free for prototyping, then GNews Essential.

## News APIs for stocks and finance

**General news APIs cover business news, but none of them is a market-data feed.** NewsAPI.org has a `business` category and GNews has a `business` topic, which is enough for "headlines mentioning NVIDIA". If you need tickers, earnings calendars, prices or filings alongside the news, use a market-data API. Our [live financial data APIs](/blog/best-apis-for-live-financial-data-2026) guide compares the real-time, delayed and end-of-day providers. If you want an agent that reads filings and answers questions about them, accuracy matters more than freshness; see [the most accurate search API for financial data](/blog/most-accurate-search-api-financial-data).

## How do you get a news API key?

1. **NewsAPI.org:** register at newsapi.org; the key arrives on screen. Send it as `apiKey` or in the `X-Api-Key` header.
2. **GNews:** register at gnews.io; pass the key as `apikey`.
3. **Test with the free tier first,** and read the commercial-use line before you put the key in a production app.

```bash
curl "https://gnews.io/api/v4/search?q=nvidia&lang=en&max=10&apikey=$GNEWS_KEY"
```

## News API vs a web search API

**A news API returns articles from a curated set of publishers, with dates and categories. A web search API returns whatever the open web says, including press releases, company blogs, filings and forums that news APIs do not index.** For a news feed, use a news API. For an AI agent answering "what happened with X this week", the open web is usually the better source, and the agent needs the article text, not a headline.

That second job is what Keirolabs does. `/search/content` returns ranked pages with clean text in one call, and `/extract` turns any article URL from a news API or RSS feed into clean markdown. A common pattern is to find stories with GNews or Google News RSS, then read them with Keirolabs. The free tier is 1,250 credits a month with no card.