News API pricing in 2026: the same 10,000 requests cost $19 or $449

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 6 October 2026Prefer this source on Google

The same 10,000 monthly requests cost $19 on TheNewsAPI's Basic plan and $449 on NewsAPI.org's Business plan, a 23-fold spread for one workload. Both figures are list prices from each vendor's own pricing page, read in October 2026.

Free plan restrictions decide when a project moves to a paid plan, and that move sets most of the news API cost. The usual triggers are a 24-hour article delay, a 30-day history window, a development-only license and a backlink requirement. This report prices 13 news data APIs, normalizes them to one monthly workload and to cost per 1,000 news articles, and lists the free-tier limits that force an upgrade.

The sections below cover billing units, a normalized 10,000-request comparison, free-tier limits, each vendor's plans, billing terms and the costs outside the rate card.

It's written for developers & data teams wiring news articles into a product or a model, and for the executive weighing a raw feed against the media monitoring tools that wrap the same news sources in a dashboard. The choice matters because a news feed is a recurring line item, and the gap between the cheapest and dearest entry plan here is $430 a month, or $5,160 a year.

How news data APIs bill

Five billing units cover every vendor in this report, and none converts into another without arithmetic:

• Requests per month or per day. NewsAPI.org, the Mediastack API, GNews, TheNewsAPI, Currents API and Perigon meter API requests. Currents resets its daily cap at 00:00 UTC and returns HTTP 429 once requests exceed it.
• Credits. A NewsData.io credit can retrieve 1 to 50 articles, and it's counted only when the call returns a result, so a query with mistyped parameters isn't charged.
• Tokens. NewsAPI.ai charges 1 token per recent article search and 5 tokens per searched year of historical data.
• Points. World News API bills 1 point per Search News call plus 0.01 points per result.
• Usage-based, per call plus per result. Webz.io charges $0.01 per news feed call and $0.005 per result.

Volume is the first lever, and the devil's in the details after it. History depth, delay, full article text, sentiment scoring, uptime commitments, support level and the license each sit on a tier boundary, and those boundaries account for most of the gap between a $24.99 plan and a $449 one.

Deep historical data is priced higher where a vendor tiers or meters it. NewsAPI.ai charges 5 tokens per searched year against 1 for the last 30 days, and NewsData.io's history grows from 6 months to 10 years as the price climbs from $199.99 to $1,299.99.

Source coverage, as each vendor states it, sits apart from price, and the cheapest plan here draws on 40,000+ sources:

• Perigon: 230,000+ news sources, $250 startup entry
• NewsAPI.org: over 150,000 news sources in 14 languages, $449
• NewsAPI.ai: 150,000+ publishers in 50+ languages, $90
• NewsCatcher: 140,000+ news sources, no published rate
• GNews: 80,000+ news sources in 41 languages, €49.99^*
• TheNewsAPI: 40,000+ news sources in 30+ languages, $19
• Mediastack: 7,500+ news sources in 13 languages, $24.99

What a single API call returns

An example makes the units concrete. NewsAPI.org's top-headlines documentation describes a request to https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines. Its parameters include q for a keyword, category for one of seven values from business to technology, sources for a list of news sources, and pageSize, 20 by default and 100 at most. An API key is required on every call.

Each article in the search results carries a source, author, title, description, URL, image URL, publish date and a content field, and a client reads the title and URL to fill a feed.

The https://newsapi.org/v2/everything endpoint covers historical articles with the same fields, and its documentation says the content field is truncated to 200 characters. A separate sources endpoint at https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines/sources lists the news sources behind top headlines, filtered by category, language and country parameters.

A free key is enough to discover which parameters each vendor supports.

GNews follows the same form, with q and category parameters set in the URL, as in these two examples from its homepage:

• https://gnews.io/api/v4/search?q=Apple for keyword search
• https://gnews.io/api/v4/top-headlines?category=technology for headlines

Another example is World News API's https://api.worldnewsapi.com/search-news, which needs at least one of its parameters per request, such as text for the keyword, a category or a number of up to 100 results. A billing unit is one of those calls, no matter how many articles it brings back.

News API cost for 10,000 requests a month

The scenario is 10,000 API requests a month, real-time articles, a license that allows production use, and 100 results per search where the API allows it. Each row is the cheapest published plan that covers it, at list price with monthly billing, checked in October 2026.

Every price in this table is the vendor's own list price at monthly billing, read off its pricing page on 6 October 2026. No Vendr medians appear in it.

^* GNews lists its plans in euros only, so they're quoted as published. At the European Central Bank reference rate of 1 EUR = 1.1269 USD, published 6 October 2026 and refreshed weekly, EUR 49.99 is about $56.33, EUR 99.99 is about $113 and EUR 249.99 is about $282. At that rate, GNews Essential's €0.067 per 1,000 articles is about 7.6 US cents. The ECB publishes the full rate history on its euro-dollar reference rate page.

Two rows include overage. On the Reporter plan, 10,000 searches at 100 results use 20,000 points against roughly 15,000 included, and 5,000 extra points at $0.003 add $15. On NewsAPI.ai, 5,000 tokens over the plan at $0.015 add $75.

Divide by articles and the order changes. Each figure below assumes the plan's full volume is used at its maximum articles per request:

• TheNewsAPI Basic: 75,000 requests at 25 articles, $0.010 per 1,000 articles
• NewsAPI.org Business: 250,000 requests at 100 articles, $0.018 per 1,000
• Currents API Builder: 75,000 requests at 50 results, $0.018 per 1,000
• World News Reporter: 7,500 searches at 100 results, $0.052 per 1,000
• GNews Essential: 30,000 requests at 25 articles, €0.067^* per 1,000
• NewsAPI.ai 5K: 5,000 searches at 100 articles, $0.18 per 1,000
• NewsData.io Basic: 20,000 credits at 50 articles, $0.20 per 1,000
• Perigon Basic: 10,000 requests at 50 results, $0.50 per 1,000
• Webz.io: $5.00 per 1,000 results in per-result fees, before call fees

At full use, NewsAPI.org's Business plan delivers 25 million articles for $449, which ties Currents for second place per article. The $449 entry price is the barrier, and a project needing 10,000 calls pays for the other 240,000.

Free plan limits that force a paid plan

Every free plan in this report caps volume, and most also withhold one production requirement: real-time news articles, history past 30 days, full text or a commercial license. That withheld item usually drives the upgrade decision.

• Delay. For example, NewsAPI.org's Developer plan serves articles 24 hours late, which rules out any app that needs news hot off the press. GNews and NewsData.io run 12 hours behind, and Mediastack's free tier carries delayed news data.
• History. GNews and Currents free plans reach back 30 days, NewsAPI.org and World News API 1 month, Perigon 3 months.
• License. NewsAPI.org's Developer plan can't run in staging or production, and its CORS is enabled for localhost only, against all origins on Business. GNews limits its free plan to development and testing, Mediastack bars commercial use, and Perigon's free tier is a personal, strictly non-commercial license.
• Attribution. The worldnewsapi.com free plan has a backlink required on your website or app.
• Results per call. TheNewsAPI's free plan returns 3 articles per request against 25 on Basic, GNews free users receive 10, and Currents caps free calls at 20.

NewsData.io, Currents API and TheNewsAPI carry no development-only clause on their pricing pages, and each pays for that freedom with a 12-hour delay, a 20-result cap or 3 articles per call.

Pricing by vendor

NewsAPI.org

NewsAPI.org publishes four plans on its pricing page, and only the last three allow production use:

• Developer: $0, 100 requests a day, live top headlines, articles up to 1 month old, basic support
• Business: $449 a month, 250,000 requests, 5 years of history, email support
• Advanced: $1,749 a month, 2 million requests, a 99.95% uptime SLA, priority email support
• Enterprise: quote only, unlimited requests, a custom SLA and dedicated chat support

Teams that outgrow 100 requests a day have to bite the bullet at $449, since no tier sits between the free key and Business.

NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry)

NewsAPI.ai, provided by Event Registry, keeps an archive since 2014 and sells tokens. The 5K plan costs $90 a month for 5,000. You create an account to get a free key with 2,000 searches, no credit card required, and support limited to documentation and a sandbox.

A single API call over recent articles takes 1 token and can retrieve up to 100 articles or 50 events, while a three-year search of historical articles burns 15. Sentiment analysis adds 0.02 tokens per document, unused tokens aren't transferable to the next month, and calls that exceed the token limit are rejected by default.

NewsData.io

NewsData.io's paid ladder climbs by history depth & enrichment:

• Basic: $199.99, 20,000 credits, 6 months of historical data
• Professional: $349.99, 50,000 credits, 2 years of historical data access, sentiment analysis and AI tags
• Corporate: $1,299.99, 1 million credits, 10 years, a 99.95 SLA agreement

Create a free account with no card required and you receive 200 credits a day, 12 hours behind, across its latest, crypto and market news endpoints. The API ships with CORS enabled for all origins, so a browser app can call it without a proxy.

GNews

GNews is €49.99^* a month for Essential, €99.99^* for Business and €249.99^* for Enterprise, with daily caps of 1,000, 5,000 and 25,000 requests and a yearly rate 20% under monthly. Leaving the free plan buys real-time articles, history back to 2020 and full content in one step.

Mediastack API

The Mediastack API's Standard plan is the second-cheapest entry in the table, at $24.99 a month for 10,000 calls of live news data cleared for commercial use. Its free plan's 100 calls a month are a drop in the bucket next to that, with HTTPS but no historical news and no support. Professional is $99.99 for 50,000 calls and Business $249.99 for 250,000. You cancel or downgrade by picking a new plan, and the change takes effect at the end of the billing period.

Mediastack's own suggestion is that plan choice "primarily depend[s] on the monthly volume of API requests". Paid plans include historical data and standard support. The Mediastack API pricing page claims uptime of "nearly 100%" on highly available cloud infrastructure, with each of its sources monitored around the clock for technical or content anomalies.

TheNewsAPI

TheNewsAPI has the lowest entry price in the table at $19. Standard at $49 allows 10,000 requests a day at 50 articles each, and Pro at $79 allows 25,000 at 100, all drawn from the same 40,000+ sources.

World News API

The plan cards tie uptime to price:

• Free: 50 points a day, 1 month of history, backlink required, Discord support, no uptime figure
• Reporter: $39, 500 points a day, 99% uptime
• Journalist: $379, 5,000 points a day, 99.9% uptime, email support
• Editor: $1,779, 50,000 points a day, 99.99% uptime, phone support

Paid plans unlock unlimited history from thousands of news sources, by the vendor's count, and you subscribe through Stripe. Per the Search News documentation, 100 search results take 2 points.

Currents API

Currents is free at 250 requests a day with basic email support, then $69 for 2,500 on Builder, $150 for 10,000 on Professional and $300 for 20,000 on Scale. History rises from 30 days to 6 months on Builder and 1 year above it, and its directory of sources lists 168 country designations.

Its usage rights table limits self-service plans to "technical API access, processing, attribution, and link-out", and republishing, archiving or reselling the news data needs separate terms and may need rights from the sources themselves.

Perigon

Perigon prices the license in the form of three license types. The free plan gives full access to all endpoints for 150 requests a month on a personal, non-commercial license, with no credit card required.

Basic at $250 and Plus at $550 a month are limited commercial licenses for eligible startups, with 10,000 and 50,000 API requests and keyword and Boolean search. Basic users receive data with a 1-hour delay, which matters for alerting, while Plus is real time and adds Sources and Journalists endpoints to discover outlets and reporters.

Every other company starts at $24,000 a year on Perigon's pricing page for a full commercial license with 10+ years of history, custom sources, an SLA and dedicated support. For an established company, that floor is a bitter pill to swallow at $2,000 a month.

Webz.io, NewsCatcher and Diffbot

Webz.io gives $5 of free usage a month with self-service support and no card required, then goes pay-as-you-go per call and per result on feeds from news, blog, forum and review sources. Archive coverage up to 10 years and premium support sit on custom pricing.

NewsCatcher publishes no rate for its News API, whose archive reaches back to January 2019, and its separate CatchAll search product starts at $50 a month for 6,000 credits. Diffbot can retrieve an article from any URL at 1 credit per page. 10,000 credits a month are free with no credit card required, and the Startup plan costs $299 for 250,000, or $1.20 per 1,000 pages.

GDELT

GDELT is free, with no strings attached on price. Its terms allow unrestricted academic, commercial or governmental use without fee, with a citation of the GDELT Project and a link to its website required. The data updates every 15 minutes in over 100 languages and dates back to 1 January 1979.

Billing, upgrades and cancellation

Subscription terms decide what a change of plan costs, and each vendor writes its own:

• Annual discount. NewsAPI.org, NewsData.io and TheNewsAPI take 20% off yearly billing, Mediastack up to 15%, Perigon 10%. Subscribe yearly and NewsAPI.org Business drops to $358.40 a month, the same 20% cut that applies to every yearly NewsAPI.org subscription.
• Upgrade. You upgrade NewsData.io from the account page, and the plan change activates once the payment clears.
• Cancel. NewsAPI.org lets you cancel any time and bills through the current period. A cancelled NewsAPI.ai account will remain active until the last day of the calendar month, and TheNewsAPI and NewsData.io let you cancel anytime.
• Downgrade. Mediastack lets you downgrade by picking a new plan and giving one reason, and the premium subscription will remain active until the billing period ends.
• Quota. When usage would exceed the monthly quota, NewsAPI.org users receive alerts, then opt into automatic billing or pause usage. NewsAPI.ai rejects calls past the token limit by default.
• Payment. You pay NewsAPI.org by invoice and ACH on annual subscriptions, NewsAPI.ai by card, PayPal or invoice, and Mediastack by major card or PayPal, with bank transfer on annual contracts. World News takes cards through Stripe.

A monthly NewsData.io subscription renews automatically every month, and a yearly one is prepaid for 12 months with the 20% discount built in.

Bing News Search retirement and the Aylien acquisition

Microsoft retired its public Bing Search and Bing Custom Search APIs on 11 August 2025, and the Bing News Search API went with them. Microsoft's lifecycle notice says existing instances were decommissioned completely and new signups closed. Microsoft's suggestion is Grounding with Bing Search, which lets Azure AI Agents pull real-time public web data into an LLM's answer. A dated shutdown like this one is the case end of life software tracks.

Aylien went a different way. Quantexa announced the acquisition on 28 February 2023, combining Aylien's NLP with its Decision Intelligence Platform, and disclosed no price.

Costs outside the rate card

The plan price is the floor of the bill. Seven line items sit outside it, and the first is a red flag for anyone planning to display full stories.

• Full text. NewsAPI.org truncates content to 200 characters on every plan, and GNews withholds it on its free plan. A team that has to retrieve full news articles, for example to train a model, pays proxy and scraping fees on top, which web scraping pricing breaks down vendor by vendor, Bright Data included, alongside the web scraping tools that do the job.
• Overage. It's par for the course here, charged at $0.0018 per extra request on NewsAPI.org Business, $0.0009 on Advanced, $0.006 per NewsData.io credit, $0.003 per World News Reporter point and $0.015 per NewsAPI.ai token. Mediastack calls that exceed the plan are charged at $0.009996 on Standard, falling to $0.00399984 on Business.
• Enrichment. Full content and enrichment are priced above basic metadata such as a title, URL and date. NewsData.io adds sentiment analysis and AI tags from Professional at $349.99, $150 above Basic, and GNews adds full content on paid plans from €49.99^*.
• Lapsed volume. NewsAPI.ai tokens and NewsData.io requests expire at month end, so a seasonal project on a monthly subscription pays for idle capacity.
• Uptime. The strongest uptime guarantees sit on upper tiers, which raises the price of reliability. NewsAPI.org's 99.95% SLA starts at $1,749 a month, NewsData.io's 99.95 SLA at $1,299.99 and the World News Editor plan's 99.99% uptime at $1,779.
• Support. Human support climbs with the plan, from none on Mediastack's free tier to dedicated chat on NewsAPI.org Enterprise and phone support on World News Editor.
• Currency. GNews plans are charged in euros, so a dollar-based budget moves with the exchange rate.

Two other routes compete for the same budget. Google News results pulled through a SERP API bill per task, the model covered in DataForSEO pricing. Dashboards bundle the feed with alerts and analysts, as Meltwater pricing, Cision pricing, Feedly pricing and social listening pricing show. Ranked market intelligence APIs and alternative data providers fill the gap for teams tracking competitors that need scored sentiment.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a news API cost?

A subscription with a commercial license runs from $19 a month on TheNewsAPI to $449 on NewsAPI.org, and you pay that before any overage. Upper tiers reach $1,749 a month on NewsAPI.org Advanced and $1,779 on World News Editor, and Perigon's full commercial license starts at $24,000 a year.

Is News API free?

NewsAPI.org's Developer plan is free, with 100 requests a day, a 24-hour delay and 1 month of history, and it's licensed for development and testing only. GDELT is the free option licensed for commercial use, with a citation required.

What is the average cost of an API?

Across the nine plans in the 10,000-request table, with GNews's €49.99^* converted to dollars, the median price is $69 a month, the Currents API Builder plan. Eight of the nine sit at $250 or less, and NewsAPI.org's $449 is the outlier.

Is a news API legal to use?

The plan license sets what you may do with the results, so read it before you subscribe. Free plans on NewsAPI.org, GNews, Mediastack and Perigon forbid production or commercial use, and Currents requires separate terms for republishing articles.

Which news API is best?

The answer turns on two questions, license scope and history depth. TheNewsAPI lets a prototype hit the ground running at $19, GNews adds full content from 80,000+ sources at €49.99^*, and NewsAPI.ai suits archive research back to 2014.

For a daily executive briefing on competitors with real-time market intelligence, Perigon's $550 Plus plan adds company and people endpoints, and NewsData.io Professional adds sentiment at $349.99.

Bottom line

News API pricing splits on the license before the volume. NewsAPI.org's free key can't ship to production, so its real entry price is $449, while TheNewsAPI and the Mediastack API sell commercial access to live news for under $25, drawing on 7,500+ and 40,000+ news sources.

Before you subscribe, price the workload twice, once per 1,000 requests and once per 1,000 articles, then pay for the news data subscription that wins on the number you'll use. The second number reverses part of the table, and the free-tier delay, history window and license usually decide the upgrade date before the request cap does. The same terms decide what a later downgrade or change of plan will cost.