The GitHub Repo With 320,000+ Free APIs: APILayer's Public APIs List

The Public APIs Repo Explained

The public-apis GitHub repository, maintained by APILayer, is the largest community-curated directory of free public APIs on the internet. It has over 424,000 GitHub stars — one of the top repositories on the platform — and catalogs APIs across 40+ categories that any developer can integrate without writing their own data infrastructure. If you need weather data, stock prices, geocoding, translation, AI tools, or almost any other real-world data feed, the answer is almost certainly in this repo.

Why does this repo matter for SaaS builders?

Every SaaS product eventually needs to integrate external data — weather, currency rates, address validation, identity verification, email, SMS. The usual path is paying a vendor, signing up for a trial, reading docs, and hoping the API doesn't break. The public-apis repo short-circuits that. It's a single indexed reference for every free API that exists, organized by category, flagged for HTTPS support and CORS compatibility, and maintained by thousands of contributors. It's the first place to look before spending money on a data vendor.

What are the best free weather APIs?

Open-Meteo is the standout: fully free, no API key required, global coverage, hourly and daily forecasts, historical data back to 1940, and it runs on open data from national weather services. Weatherstack (APILayer) offers a free tier with current conditions by location. OpenWeatherMap has a free tier covering current weather, 5-day forecasts, and basic air quality — the most widely integrated weather API in small SaaS products. For severe weather alerts in the US, the National Weather Service API (weather.gov/api) is completely free with no key required.

What are the best free finance and stock market APIs?

Alpha Vantage is the default for indie builders: free tier gives you real-time and historical stock prices, technical indicators, and FX rates with an API key and 25 requests/day. Finnhub covers stocks, crypto, and forex with a generous free tier (60 calls/minute). Marketstack (APILayer) offers end-of-day stock data for 72 global exchanges on its free tier. For crypto specifically, CoinGecko is the most comprehensive free option — no key required for basic endpoints, covering 10,000+ coins with price, volume, and market cap data.

What are the best free geocoding and maps APIs?

Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) is the canonical free geocoding API — forward and reverse geocoding, no key required, no rate limit for reasonable usage. Geoapify has a free tier at 3,000 requests/day with address autocomplete, routing, and isochrone support. IPstack (APILayer) resolves IP addresses to location data — useful for geofencing and localization without asking users for their location. For routing and directions without Google, OpenRouteService is free up to 2,000 directions requests/day.

What are the best free AI and machine learning APIs?

Hugging Face Inference API gives you access to thousands of open-source models — text classification, summarization, translation, image generation — with a free tier on hosted models. Cohere offers a free trial tier for text generation and embeddings. DeepL provides translation with a free tier (500,000 characters/month) that consistently outperforms Google Translate on European languages. For speech-to-text, AssemblyAI has a free tier covering 5 hours of audio per month.

What are the best free email and communication APIs?

Resend is the current developer-favorite transactional email API — 3,000 emails/month free, dead-simple API, React Email integration. Mailgun offers 100 emails/day free with deliverability tooling. For email validation (catching typos and disposable addresses before they hit your list), mailboxlayer (APILayer) and Abstract API's Email Validator both have free tiers. For SMS, Twilio provides a trial account with $15 credit, and Vonage offers 2 euros of free credit on signup — enough to validate an SMS flow before committing.

What are the best free data and utility APIs?

REST Countries returns structured data for every country — name, capital, currency, calling code, flag — with no authentication required. JSONPlaceholder is a fake REST API for testing and prototyping with no setup. Public Holiday API covers public holidays for 100+ countries. PokeAPI is the canonical test API for developers learning REST — complete Pokémon data, no key, always up. For QR code generation, GoQR.me is a free, keyless API that generates QR codes as image URLs directly.

How is the public-apis repo organized?

Each entry in the repo lists the API name, a short description, the authentication method (None / API Key / OAuth), whether it supports HTTPS, and CORS status. The README is a single long markdown file organized alphabetically by category — Animals, Anime, Anti-Malware, Art & Design, Authentication, Blockchain, Books, Business, Calendar, Cloud Storage, Continuous Integration, Cryptocurrency, Currency Exchange, Data Validation, Development, Dictionaries, Documents & Productivity, Email, Entertainment, Environment, Events, Finance, Food & Drink, Games & Comics, Geocoding, Government, Health, Jobs, Machine Learning, Music, News, Open Data, Open Source Projects, Patent, Personality, Phone, Photography, Programming, Science & Math, Security, Shopping, Social, Sports & Fitness, Test Data, Text Analysis, Tracking, Transportation, URL Shorteners, Vehicle, Video, Weather. Forty-plus categories, thousands of entries, all linkable to the source documentation.

What is APILayer and who maintains this repo?

APILayer is an API marketplace that sells commercial API products — currency exchange, email validation, VAT validation, IP geolocation — while also maintaining the public-apis open source repository as a community resource. The repo originated independently and was adopted by the APILayer team. Community contributors submit new APIs via pull request; there are over 1,300 open pull requests at any given time, reflecting how aggressively developers add new entries. APILayer's commercial APIs (Fixer, IPstack, Marketstack, Weatherstack, mailboxlayer) all appear in the repo alongside their free tiers.

Related: WorldView: The Free GitHub Repo That Recreates Palantir's Billion-Dollar Intelligence Platform

Verdict

The public-apis repo is the closest thing developers have to a canonical API phonebook. Before paying for any data API, check here. The free tiers catalogued in this repo are enough to ship most SaaS MVP features without touching a credit card — and for the ones that do require paid plans, the free tier gives you enough runway to validate whether the integration is worth it. Bookmark it, fork it, and stop re-discovering the same APIs from blog posts.

This post references third-party APIs and services for informational purposes. Free tier limits and availability are subject to change — verify with each provider before building in production.