20 Free APIs That Still Work in 2026 (Tested This Week)

I Tested 50+ Free APIs. These 20 Actually Work. No broken endpoints. No surprise paywalls. No deprecated docs. Data and Research API What It Does Key? Limit OpenAlex 250M+ papers No 100K/day Crossref 140M+ DOIs No 50/sec ORCID 18M researchers No 24/sec Semantic Scholar 200M papers Yes 100/5min Internet Archive 800B web pages No Polite Wikipedia 60M+ articles No Polite Weather and Geo API What It Does Key? Limit Open-Meteo Forecast + historical No 10K/day Nominatim Geocoding No 1/sec OSRM Routing No Fair use ip-api.com IP geolocation No 45/min Security API What It Does Key? Limit HIBP Passwords Breach check No Unlimited crt.sh SSL certs No Polite Shodan Device search Yes 100/mo VirusTotal Malware scan Yes 4/min Developer Tools API What It Does Key? Limit GitHub Repos, users Yes 5000/hr npm Registry Packages No Fair use PyPI Python pkgs No Fair use Open Library 20M+ books No Fair use Dead APIs (Skip These) Twitter/X: $100/month minimum NewsAPI: free tier = yesterday only Google Maps: $20