I needed free APIs for a project, so I went looking. Every list I found had the same problem: entries that say "free" but aren't.
Someone ran hourly pings against the public-apis repo on GitHub (350k+ stars) and found conservatively 15–25% of entries degraded — dead, paywalled, moved endpoints, or rate-limited far below what the docs claim. The casualties are familiar names: Dark Sky (killed Dec 2022 after the Apple acquisition), Twitter's v1.1 free tier (paywalled July 2023, $100/mo minimum), Reddit's free API (effectively killed June 2023), Yahoo Finance v7 (dead since 2017), Weather Underground's free tier (sunset 2019).
Free LLM APIs decay even faster. One check in September 2026 found half of them dead after just two months — Cerebras returning "402 Payment Required", Gemini models disappearing from the catalog, Groq keys going 401.
The pattern is always the same: a startup launches a generous free tier, the tier becomes a real AWS line item, then monetization or an acquisition kills it. And nobody files removal PRs — removing a dead entry doesn't grow the catalog, so the dead ones just stay listed.
"Free" itself has become a weasel word. It can mean genuinely free, free-after-you-add-a-card, free-until-we-change-our-minds, or free-behind-a-login-wall. A list that doesn't verify can't tell the difference.
That's why I built FreeAPIs (https://freeapis.akclnt.com) — a directory that only lists APIs with a real free tier and live-tests the endpoints, so dead ones drop off instead of lingering. 1,769 APIs in there now.
My question for you: what's a free API you've used for years that has genuinely stayed free? I'm collecting the survivors.
Sources: the public-apis audit (https://dev.to/a10ayassine/i-audited-the-350k-star-public-apis-list-with-hourly-pings-20-of-it-is-broken-4447) and the free-LLM-API check (http://dev.to/orca_forge/half-of-free-llm-apis-were-dead-after-2-months-o14)
