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Use when suggesting APIs for a project, looking for free data sources, building weekend projects that need external data, or when the user needs weather, news, finance, sports, ML, or entertainment data without paid subscriptions
Passed 24 of 25 test cases with the skill, and 20 of 25 without it.
and 2 more in the full report
4 fixed20 passed either way1 still failing0 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 4 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
An open-data project needs access to official GPO federal publications. What API service provides this access under the api.data.gov key, and what new AI interface protocol was recently introduced in public preview?
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Identifies GovInfo as the GPO federal publication service using the api.data.gov key. | Passed | Passed |
| Mentions the public preview MCP server for GovInfo. | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
A short list of free APIs that work for journalism, research, and weekend projects under current free-tier conditions. The value here is curation under verified 2026 free-tier limits, not coverage. For breadth, defer to the canonical aggregator below.
For a near-complete inventory of free public APIs across every category (1000+ entries, actively maintained), use:
Not archived, last commit verified 2026-05-09, 4,600+ commits, 6,000+ merged PRs. When you need an API outside the categories below, search there first.
This skill curates the journalism-relevant subset.
| API | Status | What to use instead |
|---|---|---|
| IEX Cloud | Fully retired 2024-08-31. https://iexcloud.org/ | Alpha Vantage, Tiingo IEX, Financial Modeling Prep, Polygon |
| CrowdTangle | Sunset 2024-08-14 | Meta Content Library (academic/non-profit-research only, most journalists ineligible). https://transparency.meta.com/researchtools/meta-content-library/ |
| ProPublica Congress API | Retired 2024-07-10, repo archived. https://www.propublica.org/nerds/congress-api-update | api.congress.gov (Library of Congress, free with api.data.gov key) |
| X / Twitter API free tier | Effectively eliminated for new developers as of Feb 2026; pay-per-use only. Uncertain on exact figures (provider pricing page returned 402). Treat as paid. | No free replacement; closest free alternatives are Bluesky Jetstream + Mastodon |
| Reddit API | Free for research/non-commercial only since June 2023; paid for commercial use. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/api/ | (Same, usable for journalism research, prohibited for monetized products) |
| Hugging Face Inference API | Rebranded to Inference Providers (router across 20+ providers). Free users now get $0.10/month in credits, down from previous unmetered free tier for many models. https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing | Free tier still works for low-volume / embeddings; paid for production |
All entries below verified against provider pages on 2026-05-09 unless marked uncertain. Always confirm rate limits against the provider's live developer docs before depending on them in production.
| API | Free tier | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| GDELT 2.0 | Fully free, no auth | Global news + knowledge graph, updates every 15 min, BigQuery-mirrored. Strong for cross-border / longitudinal monitoring. |
| NewsAPI | 100 req/day, 24h delay, 1mo window, dev-only | Commercial use prohibited on free tier. Not usable in shipped products. |
| GNews | 100 req/day, 30d window, 12h delay, non-commercial | 10 articles/request cap. |
| Mediastack | 100 req/month, 30-min delay | Functionally a demo. |
| NYT Article Search / Top Stories | Free with key, daily cap (uncertain, verify) | Solid for archival queries. |
test cases passed, vs 20 / 25 without
More skills from the same source and nearby in the registry, with their headline benchmark lift.