Free as in beer 🍺
Costs nothing. No price tag, no invoice, no metered billing. You can use it without paying.
Free as in freedom 🗽
You have the freedom to use, study, modify and share it. The source is open and the license protects those rights.
The distinction comes from the free software movement. As its advocates like to put it: think of "free speech," not "free beer." Many languages keep the two ideas in separate words — French has gratuit (no cost) and libre (liberty). English smashes them into one overloaded word, which is exactly where confusion creeps in. A service can be gratis but not libre (a free-tier app you can't inspect or self-host), or libre but not gratis (open-source software you pay a company to run for you).
The free software movement
In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project to build a complete operating system that users would be free to control. In 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to support that work and to articulate what "free" should mean for software. The core idea: software freedom is a matter of liberty, not price. A program is free software if it respects the users' freedom and community.
The four essential freedoms
The FSF defines free software as software that grants its users four freedoms:
- Freedom 0 — to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- Freedom 1 — to study how the program works and change it, so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition.
- Freedom 2 — to redistribute copies so you can help others.
- Freedom 3 — to distribute copies of your modified versions to others, giving the whole community a chance to benefit.
To keep those freedoms from being stripped away downstream, Stallman devised copyleft: a clever use of copyright that requires anyone who redistributes the work — modified or not — to pass the same freedoms along. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the best-known copyleft license. It is why a fork of a GPL project must itself remain free.
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer." — The Free Software Foundation, What is Free Software?
Free software vs. open source
You'll also hear the term open source. In practice the two describe almost the same set of software, but they emphasize different things. The free software movement frames the issue ethically — freedom and community. The open source movement, which emerged later, tends to emphasize practical benefits: better code, fewer bugs, easier collaboration. GratisAPI is happy to fly both flags. What matters to us is that you actually have the freedoms.
Why GratisAPI is both
Plenty of "free" APIs are a trap. You sign up, you get a key, you accept tracking, you hit a rate limit, and one day the free tier vanishes or the whole service is acquired and shut down. That is gratis at best — and a conditional, revocable gratis at that. It is never libre.
GratisAPI is built to be both, permanently:
- Gratis — every endpoint is a static JSON file on a global CDN. There is no server to meter, no account, no key, no bill. It costs you nothing because it costs almost nothing to host.
- Libre — the entire project, data and generator alike, is licensed GPL-2.0-or-later. You can read it, run it, change it, and redistribute it. If GratisAPI ever disappeared, you could clone the repository and bring it back to life in minutes. That is the whole point of copyleft: the freedom cannot be taken away from you.
Because the data is static and open, there is nothing to lock you in and nothing to spy on you with. No API key means no way to profile you. No server means no request logs to sell. The source means you never have to trust us — you can verify.
The enshittification of "free" APIs
We have all watched the same story play out. A company launches a generous free API. Developers build on it. Then the free tier shrinks, keys become mandatory, rate limits tighten, prices appear, terms change, and eventually the API is deprecated or the company is acquired and it vanishes overnight. The "free" was always bait — a way to capture developers before the value was extracted back out. When the only copy of the data and the code lives on someone else's server, you are a tenant, not an owner, and tenants get evicted.
GratisAPI is designed so that story cannot happen here. There is no company to change its mind, no server bill that comes due, no dashboard to gate behind a paywall. The data is public, the code is copyleft, and the whole thing is a folder of files. The worst case — this domain going away — is survivable in minutes because you can host the exact same files yourself.
Our promises
- No keys, ever. Access will never require an account, a token, or a sign-up.
- No rate limits. There is no server counting your requests, so there is nothing to throttle.
- No tracking. Static files can't run analytics or set cookies on you. We don't know who you are, and we like it that way.
- No cost. Not a trial, not a freemium tier — actually free, indefinitely.
- Always forkable. The GPL guarantees you can take everything and run. That guarantee is the product.
Why we built it
Because the small, joyful building blocks of the web keep disappearing behind login walls. A student who just wants a list of the chemical elements, a hobbyist prototyping a quote-of-the-day widget, a teacher pulling country capitals into a lesson — none of them should need a credit card, an OAuth flow, or a rate-limit budget. Reference data about the world is a commons. It belongs to everyone, and it should be a `fetch()` away, free.
GratisAPI is a small act of faith that the web can still have public, permanent, no-strings utilities — and a demonstration that "static" is not a limitation but a superpower. The technical write-up explains exactly how it works.
Fork it. Please.
The best proof that something is libre is that you can walk away with it. Clone the repo, add your own datasets, host it on your own domain, and keep the GPL intact. That is not a loophole in GratisAPI — it is GratisAPI.
Read the articles → Browse the APIs
Further reading, straight from the source: the Free Software Foundation's definition of free software and its essay on the two meanings of "free." GratisAPI is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FSF or the GNU Project.