Hot Take: Most Developers Overpay for APIs They Could Get for Free

I've been cataloging free APIs for 2 weeks. I found 300+ APIs that require no API key and no payment. Some things that surprised me: Weather data : Open-Meteo gives you 16-day forecasts + historical data. Free. No key. Most developers pay $50-200/month for weather APIs. Geocoding : Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) does forward + reverse geocoding. Free. Google Maps charges $5 per 1,000 requests. Vulnerability scanning : OSV.dev covers 40+ ecosystems. Free. Snyk charges $25/month for basically the same data. Academic papers : OpenAlex has 250M papers. Free. Elsevier/Scopus charges universities millions per year. Stock data : Yahoo Finance endpoint gives real-time-ish prices. Free. Bloomberg terminal: $24,000/year. My argument: For most side projects and small companies, free APIs are more than enough . The premium APIs add: Higher rate limits (but 45 req/min from ip-api is fine for most) SLAs (but for side projects, who cares?) Support (but Stack Overflow exists) The counter-argument: "Free AP