The whole bill
| Item | What we use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Static hosting & bandwidth | Cloudflare Pages (free plan) | $0 — unlimited |
| Source & CI/CD | GitHub + GitHub Actions (public repo) | $0 |
| TLS, CDN, DDoS protection | Cloudflare (included) | $0 |
| Domain name | gratisapi.com | $14 / year |
| Dynamic API compute (planned) | Cloudflare Workers | free tier, then $0.30 / extra 100k requests |
| To run the site today | just the domain | $14 / year |
Hosting is genuinely $0
The static API is a pile of files on a CDN. Cloudflare Pages serves static assets with
unlimited bandwidth on the free plan, GitHub hosts the source and runs the
build for free, and TLS and the global edge are included. No matter how many people
fetch the data, the hosting bill stays exactly zero. That's the superpower of
static: popularity doesn't cost anything.
The only real cost: the domain
The one fixed expense is the domain, gratisapi.com — $14 a
year. It's paid out of pocket, and it's small enough that it will simply keep
being paid. That's the entire recurring cost of running GratisAPI as it exists today:
inexpensive to build, inexpensive to keep alive.
The dynamic API changes the math
A dynamic API (filtering, search, random) needs code
to run on each request, and that's the first time a request costs anything. On Cloudflare
Workers there's a free allotment, and beyond it each additional block of requests costs
about $0.30 per extra 100,000 requests — cheap, but no longer zero. The
genuinely hard part isn't the price; it's that without API keys it's difficult to
stop a single heavy user from spending the whole budget. Keys would fix it, but
keys are exactly what we promised never to require. Squaring that circle — generous limits,
no accounts — is the interesting problem we're working on.
How it's funded
Out of pocket, plus donations. The domain and any future compute are covered by the maintainers; if GratisAPI is useful to you and you'd like to help keep it free, the best ways are to star and contribute on GitHub or sponsor the project (coming soon). No donation is ever required to use anything here.
Or make your cost $0 too — fork it
Because everything is open source under the GPL, you never have to depend on our budget. Clone the repo and deploy the static API to any free host for $0; if you add a dynamic layer later, you pay only your own pennies. Self-hosting is a first-class option, not a fallback — see the build guide.
The bottom line
GratisAPI costs $14 a year to run — one domain renewal — and nothing to use. It's cheap by design, open by license, and free by promise, and every one of those three is what keeps the other two honest.