2026-10-26, News · Fundamentals

Best news APIs for 2027: coverage, history, prices

Paid news API plans differ on five things that decide a build: how late articles arrive, how far back the archive goes, whether you get the article body or 200 characters of it, what the license lets you do, and what a month costs at your request count. This post compares paid plans for developers. Free tiers are covered in free news APIs.

Facts come from each vendor’s own pricing, documentation or product page, linked and checked on 2026-10-26. “Not stated” means not found on those pages on that date. Source, country and language counts are the vendors’ own claims. Prices are what the pages listed in October 2026, for 2027 budgets; re-check before you sign.

Comparison

The first ten search their own article index. The last three return what Google News shows for a query, which is a different measurement; see two kinds of news API.

Two names from older guides are gone or unclear:

• Bing News Search API. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025 and points customers to Grounding with Bing Search in Azure AI Agents (Microsoft notice).
• Aylien News API. Quantexa announced its acquisition of Aylien on 2023-02-28 (Quantexa). On 2026-10-26 aylien.com and docs.aylien.com did not load, and Quantexa’s news intelligence page showed no prices or plans. Ask Quantexa before planning around it.

The APIs

NewsAPI.org

Three endpoints: /v2/everything, /v2/top-headlines and /v2/sources. Each article has source, author, title, description, url, urlToImage, publishedAt and content, and the docs say content is truncated to 200 characters. The FAQ says it cannot provide full content and suggests fetching the URL yourself.

Business is $449 a month for 250,000 requests, $0.0018 per extra request, real-time, with 5 years of history. Advanced is $1,749 a month for 2 million requests with a 99.95% SLA. The free Developer plan cannot be used “in a staging or production environment (including internally)”, so a production build starts at $449.

Fits teams that want headlines and links from a large index, have their own article fetcher, and need a few years of backfill.

GNews

/api/v4/search and /api/v4/top-headlines on every plan (docs). Essential is €49.99 a month (€39.99 billed yearly) for 1,000 requests a day, 25 articles per request, real-time, history from 2020, full article content and commercial use. Business is €99.99 for 5,000 requests a day and Enterprise €249.99 for 25,000.

At 25 articles a request, Essential returns up to 25,000 articles a day with body text. The free plan is non-commercial, 12 hours late and truncated, so test on Essential.

Fits small commercial products that need article text and real-time delivery at a low monthly price.

NewsData.io

Plans are counted in credits, each returning 1 to 10 articles. Basic is $199.99 a month for 20,000 credits and 6 months of history; Professional $349.99 for 50,000 credits and 2 years; Corporate $1,299.99 for 1 million credits and 10 years. An archive call costs 5 credits. The pricing page lists “full article content” only under Custom; it did not say whether lower plans include it.

Its language count (90+) and country count (206+) are the highest claims here after Webz.io.

Fits multilingual monitoring where language coverage matters more than article text.

Mediastack

Standard is $24.99 a month for 10,000 calls with live data, history and commercial use, about $0.01 per extra call; Professional $99.99 for 50,000; Business $249.99 for 250,000. The homepage claims 7,500+ sources in 13 languages, “updated every minute”. The response sample shows a truncated description and no body.

It is the lowest-priced commercial plan in the table. Its index is the smallest claimed here, and the pages checked state no archive depth.

Fits headline feeds and widgets with a small budget.

NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry)

article/getArticles returns articles and event/getEvents groups articles about the same event. The homepage claims 150,000+ publishers in 50+ languages, data since 2014, over 1 million articles a day, availability “minutes after” publication, and “Every response carries the full article text”.

Billing is in tokens: a search over recent articles is 1 token, an archive search 5 tokens per year searched, extra tokens $0.015. The 5K plan is $90 a month; the plans page did not show unambiguous quotas per plan.

A 5-year archive search costs 25 tokens, so price backfills separately from daily polling.

Fits research, event detection and NLP pipelines that need full text and a long archive.

Webz.io

The News API page claims 350K+ sources (the same page also says 300K+), 170+ languages, 200+ countries, history back to 2008 and full text. Pricing is usage-based with $5 of free credit a month; no list prices are published. News API Lite is free for non-commercial projects: 1,000 calls a month, 10 articles a call, 30 days back (announcement).

Fits archive-heavy work, such as model training sets or long-range trend studies, where you will negotiate a contract anyway.

Perigon

Perigon has no free API plan, only one free monitor. Individual is from $25 a month for 1K requests, 3 months of history and a personal, non-commercial license, with a 1-hour delay. Startup is from $250 for 10K requests, 3 years and “limited commercial use”, also 1 hour late. Commercial is from $1,250 for 25K requests, 10+ years, real-time and an SLA. The homepage claims 230,000+ sources and a 6-minute average from report to index.

Real-time delivery and full commercial rights start at the $1,250 plan.

Fits funded products that need a decade of history and an SLA.

NewsCatcher

Endpoints include /search, /latest_headlines, /breaking_news, /authors, /search_by_link and /aggregation_count. Articles carry a content field, “the content of the article”, which the docs say may be partial for paywalled sources. The homepage claims 140k+ sources, 100+ countries, data from 2019, and most content within 10 minutes.

The Individual plan is $0 a month with pay-as-you-go credits and a 7-day trial; the pricing page says “Production on Enterprise”, which is custom-priced with the full archive. Per-call prices were not published.

Fits enterprise buyers who want article text and author search under a negotiated contract.

TheNewsAPI

Endpoints /v1/news/all, /top, /similar, /uuid, /sources and /headlines (Standard and up). The documentation defines snippet as “the first 60 characters of the article body”. Basic is $19 a month for 2,500 requests a day and 25 articles per request; Standard $49 for 10,000 a day; Pro $79 for 25,000 a day. History depth and commercial terms were not stated.

Fits high request counts on a small budget when headlines and links are enough.

Currents API

/v1/search and /v1/latest-news. The response has a description and no body field (schema). Builder is $69 a month for 2,500 requests a day and 6 months of history; Professional $150 for 10,000 a day and 1 year; Scale $300 for 20,000 a day. The pricing page says self-service covers “technical API access, processing, attribution, and link-out”, and that redistribution or archival use may need separate terms.

Fits apps that display headlines and link out; storing articles needs a separate agreement.

SerpApi and SearchApi Google News

Both return the Google News results page for a query. SerpApi’s engine=google_news returns news_results with position, title, source (name, icon, authors), link, thumbnail, date and iso_date. Starter is $25 a month for 1,000 searches, and its U.S. Legal Shield starts with the $150 Production plan (pricing). SearchApi’s engine=google_news returns organic_results with position, title, link, source, date, snippet, favicon and thumbnail; Developer is $40 a month for 10,000 searches (pricing).

Fits teams already using either vendor for Google Search.

AnswerLine Google News

POST /v1/monitor/google/news takes a query, a country (or gl) and an optional hl, and returns result.newsResults[] in the order Google News shows them:

• position, title, source (the publisher name) and page.
• date: the publication time as an ISO 8601 UTC timestamp.
• link: a news.google.com redirect to the article.

There is no snippet, article text or archive: a request reads the results as they are now. Country and hl choose the edition, for example CA with fr; a pair Google has no edition for fails unbilled. Every article comes back on page 1, so leave pages at 1.

A request costs $0.0002 at the Starter tier, $0.14–$0.20 per 1,000 across tiers, the same synchronous or as an async task. New accounts get 100 free requests and failed requests are not charged (pricing). Batches of up to 500 tasks go to a signed webhook, and the same key answers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok, Google AI Mode and Google Search.

Fits measuring what Google News shows readers, per edition: coverage share, prominence of a negative story, adverse media evidence. Pair it with an index from the list above when you also need article text.

How to choose

1. Index or results page. To collect what was written, use an index. To know what Google News puts in front of readers, in order, use a results API. Screening and PR teams often need both.
2. Article text. If you classify, summarize or extract entities, rule out APIs that return 60 or 200 characters. NewsAPI.ai, Webz.io and GNews from Essential list full text; NewsCatcher’s may be partial.
3. Freshness on the plan you will buy. Free plans run 12 to 24 hours late, and Perigon’s plans below Commercial 1 hour late. Test alert latency on the paid key.
4. History. A one-off backfill and a daily poll have different costs. NewsAPI.ai charges archive searches per year searched; NewsData.io charges 5 credits per archive call.
5. Terms. Check production rights (NewsAPI.org’s free plan, Perigon Individual, Mediastack Free and Webz.io Lite exclude them) and storage rights (Currents asks for separate terms for archival use).
6. Articles per request. GNews and TheNewsAPI return up to 25 per request on paid plans, NewsData.io up to 10 per credit. Compare articles per dollar.
7. Your languages. Run your real watchlist in each market’s language on a trial and count results.

Cost example

A watchlist of 50 queries, checked every 2 hours for 30 days: 50 × 12 × 30 = 18,000 requests a month, one request per check. List prices checked 2026-10-26, before tax; free allowances ignored.

NewsAPI.ai, Webz.io and NewsCatcher are left out because their pages did not publish a quota or price that maps to 18,000 requests. The rows also buy different things: TheNewsAPI’s $19 returns 60-character snippets, GNews’ €49.99 returns full text, AnswerLine returns Google’s order of results with no text. Price the job, including the article fetcher or second vendor you would add. AI monitoring cost planning covers sizing a recurring program.

Checking which indexed stories Google News shows

The link of a Google News result is a redirect, so join an index’s articles to results on publisher and title. This takes article records from any index (title and publisher name) and reports where each one sits in Google News for the same query and edition:

import os, re, requests

def key(source: str, title: str) -> str:
    return re.sub(r"\W+", " ", f"{source} {title}").strip().lower()

def google_news_positions(query: str, country: str, hl: str, indexed: list[dict]) -> list[tuple]:
    resp = requests.post(
        "https://api.answerline.dev/v1/monitor/google/news",
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['API_KEY']}"},
        json={"query": query, "country": country, "hl": hl},
        timeout=330,
    )
    resp.raise_for_status()
    shown = {key(r.get("source", ""), r["title"]): r["position"]
             for r in resp.json()["result"].get("newsResults", [])}
    return [(a["title"], shown.get(key(a["source"], a["title"]))) for a in indexed]

indexed = [{"source": "Example News", "title": "Acme expands recall to second product line"}]
for title, position in google_news_positions('"acme corp" recall', "US", "en", indexed):
    print(position or "not shown", title)

Articles with a position are the ones readers see first; the rest exist in the index but not on the results page. Exact title matching misses headlines a publisher edited after indexing, so log the misses and review them on the first runs.

Pitfalls

• Counting requests instead of articles. At 3 or 25 articles per request, the price per article differs about 8 times.
• Building on a free plan’s terms. NewsAPI.org’s free plan excludes internal use; porting to a $449 plan late changes the budget.
• Assuming full text. “Content” fields are often truncated: 200 characters at NewsAPI.org, 60 at TheNewsAPI.
• Storing what the license does not cover. Read the archival and redistribution terms before you build a database of articles.
• Following tutorials for retired APIs. Bing News Search was retired on August 11, 2025.
• Treating index relevance as visibility. An index’s ranking is its own; Google News’ order is what readers see.

Field reference: Google News engine page. Pipeline design: news monitoring.

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