Over 1,700 Free Open-Source APIs with 471K+ Stars – A Practical Guide

When I was building small tools, I often got stuck at the data‑finding stage; the UI was ready but I lacked weather, exchange‑rate, or test‑data endpoints.

A friend suggested the GitHub project public-apis, which aggregates free APIs in a single list. The README contains 51 categories and over 1,700 entries, is MIT‑licensed and has attracted more than 470 k stars.

The list groups APIs by fine‑grained categories such as Animals, Art & Design, Finance, Currency/Crypto, Weather, Food, News, Games, Anime, Transportation, Machine Learning, Books, Test Data, and Entertainment. Each entry shows Description, Auth, HTTPS, and CORS columns, allowing quick assessment of suitability. For front‑end practice, entries with Auth = No and HTTPS = CORS = Yes are the easiest to try.

The repository’s contribution guide enforces that each entry must have official documentation, a concise description, and correct categorisation; promotional paid services are discouraged. The list helps filter candidates, but the actual usage limits, stability, and licensing must be verified on the service’s official site before production use.

In addition to the README, the project provides a companion public API with endpoints /entries, /random, /categories, and /health, which can query the catalogue programmatically without authentication. This can be used to build a personal API navigation page or other small tools.

Typical scenarios include building demos or prototypes, practicing API calls, creating internal utilities (e.g., currency conversion, weather lookup), generating content pages (e.g., animal pictures, jokes), or assembling a custom API directory.

My personal takeaway is that public-apis saves time in the early data‑search phase; it provides candidate endpoints that can be quickly vetted, though final adoption still depends on quota, stability, terms, and compliance considerations.

https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis