Public APIs

What is this?

Public APIs is a massive community-curated list of free APIs for literally everything — weather, finance, music, games, geocoding, machine learning, jokes, government data, you name it. Over 40 categories, thousands of entries, each one labeled with whether it needs auth, HTTPS, and CORS support. 486k stars, MIT license, maintained since 2016.

If you've ever thought "there must be a free API for this" — there is, and it's probably on this list.

What problem does it solve?

Every developer hits the same wall: you need data (weather, stocks, maps, memes, flight prices) and you don't want to build the infrastructure behind it. So you Google "free weather API" and drown in SEO spam, dead links, and pricing pages hiding behind "contact sales."

This repo is the shortcut the entire internet agreed on. One page, every category, each API with a one-line description plus the three things you actually need to know before trying it:

API entry = name + description + Auth? + HTTPS? + CORS?

No signup walls to browse. No sorting through blogspam. Just the list.

How does it work?

It's a README. A 2,500-line, lovingly maintained README. Here's how to actually use it:

1. Open the repo
2. Ctrl+F your category (Weather? Finance? Games?)
3. Pick an API marked "No" under Auth (fastest start)
4. Check CORS = Yes if calling from a browser
5. fetch() and go

The columns matter more than they look:

• Auth — No means try it in the next 30 seconds. apiKey means free signup. OAuth means set aside an afternoon.
• HTTPS — almost everything is Yes now. If No, skip it.
• CORS — Yes means your frontend JavaScript can call it directly. No means you need a backend proxy, and beginners should pick a different API.

Real example — weather in the browser in under a minute:

# Open-Meteo: no key, HTTPS, CORS-friendly
curl "https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&current=temperature_2m"

That's the whole pattern this list enables: find it, curl it, ship it.

Repository Structure

public-apis/public-apis/
├── README.md            # the entire project — 2,500+ lines, 40+ categories
├── .github/             # issue templates, CI checks, assets
└── FORMAT.md (guide)    # contribution rules — every entry follows the same format

There is no code. That's the point. The value is curation: every entry was submitted by a human, reviewed by maintainers, and must follow strict formatting (alphabetical order, no URL shorteners, working links only).

Key Features

• 40+ categories — Animals, Anime, Blockchain, Books, Business, Calendar, Crypto, Currency Exchange, Development, Email, Entertainment, Environment, Events, Finance, Food & Drink, Games, Geocoding, Government, Health, Jobs, Machine Learning, Music, News, Open Data, Photography, Science, Security, Shopping, Social, Sports, Text Analysis, Transportation, Video, Weather, and more
• Auth/HTTPS/CORS labels on every entry — the three filters that decide whether an API is usable for your project
• Manually curated since 2016 — pull requests reviewed by humans; dead APIs get removed
• Beginner goldmine — hackathon projects, portfolio pieces, and weekend builds all start here
• The standard reference — linked from virtually every "free API" article ever written, which is why it has half a million stars

What You'll Learn

• How to evaluate a free API in 10 seconds (auth, HTTPS, CORS, rate limits)
• Where to find data for any side project without building infrastructure
• The difference between API auth types and what they cost you in setup time
• Why CORS decides whether your frontend can call an API directly
• How community curation at scale actually works (2,500 lines, zero code)