I Tracked Every API I Used for 30 Days — Here Are the 7 That Survived

The Experiment Last month I tracked every free API I integrated into projects. Started with 23. After hitting rate limits, broken docs, surprise paywalls, and random downtime, only 7 survived. Here's what actually works in production. The Survivors 1. OpenAlex (Academic Data) What: 250M+ research papers, authors, institutions Why it survived: Generous limits, clean JSON, no key needed Surprise: Better than Google Scholar for programmatic access import requests r = requests . get ( " https://api.openalex.org/works?search=transformer+architecture&per_page=5 " ) papers = r . json ()[ " results " ] 2. Open-Meteo (Weather) What: Weather data for any location, historical + forecast Why it survived: No API key, 10K requests/day, actually accurate Killed: OpenWeatherMap (required key + had wrong forecasts) 3. Internet Archive Wayback CDX What: 800B+ archived web pages Why it survived: No limits, unique data no one else has Use case: Competitive analysis — see how any website changed over time