Pricing
One plan, and it's free. It covers non-commercial apps, deployed ones included, with real-time data. Credits use published weights: reads cost one, search and embedding routes two, and LLM-backed routes fifty.
Non-commercial projects, research, and evaluation.
All limitsCredits, channels, support, and commercial use
The free plan can call every v1 endpoint. The limits below are the whole list.
| FREE | |
|---|---|
| Price | $0 |
| Credits / month | 1,000 |
| Daily ceiling | 50 credits |
| LLM calls (profiles, channel creation) | 20 / mo, separate pool |
| Rate limit | 1 rps / 3 burst |
| Every v1 endpoint (stories, search, topics, channels) | ✓ |
| Persistent channels | 1 |
| Commercial use | — |
| Attribution required | Yes |
| Support | Community |
How credits are countedPublished weights for reads, search, and LLM-backed calls
Reads and channel management cost one credit, search and embedding routes two, and LLM-backed routes fifty. These weights don't change with query parameters or partway through a month. LLM calls draw on a separate pool of 20 per month, so using up that pool doesn't touch your read credits. The dashboard reports usage by day and endpoint.
| CALL | COUNTS AS |
|---|---|
| Everything not listed below | 1 credit |
| Search and embedding routes | 2 credits |
POST /v1/topics/profile | 50 credits |
POST /v1/channels (channel creation) | 50 credits |
What news API pricing can hideFree-tier delays, response caps, and credit multipliers
Pricing pages can obscure the cost of a real integration through free-tier restrictions, response caps, and variable credit weights. The examples below link to each vendor's published pricing, checked August 2026.
NewsAPI.org's free plan, per their pricing page, "cannot be used in a staging or production environment", is limited to localhost, and delays articles 24 hours. Its first production plan costs $449/month. GNews's free plan, per theirs, delays articles 12 hours and is non-commercial. Hivewire's free plan is also non-commercial, but its data is real-time and deployed apps are allowed.
GNews caps responses at 25, 50, or 100 articles per request, depending on the tier. A "request" is therefore a unit of pagination, and one broad query can become several billed calls. Hivewire has no per-article caps: a story's sources come attached, not paginated.
Some calls genuinely cost more, but credit pricing is only useful when the weights are published and stable. NewsAPI.ai, per its plans page, charges 1 token for a recent article search, 5 for an event search, and up to 5–50 tokens per searched year on archives. The request you need can cost fifty times the one on the pricing page. Our weights are the table above: 1 / 2 / 50, independent of your parameters and unchanged mid-cycle. Price out your real query before you sign up, here or anywhere else.
For side-by-side product comparisons, including when another provider is a better fit, see hivewire.ai/compare.
Common questions
Is the free plan delayed or dev-only?
No. It uses the real-time feed and works from deployed apps. It is limited to non-commercial use and requires attribution. See how we compare.
Is there a paid plan?
No. The free plan is the only plan. Paid plans ended on October 22, 2026, and there is nothing to buy or cancel.
What counts as a request?
Every authenticated API call. Most calls cost one credit; search costs two, and the two LLM-backed routes cost fifty. There is no per-story or per-token pricing.
When do credits reset?
On the 1st of each month at 00:00 UTC. Unused credits don't roll over.
What happens when I run out?
Requests return 429 until the next reset. There is no overage charge, and there is no way to buy more credits.
What does "non-commercial" mean?
Personal projects, research, and internal prototypes. A product that makes money, or ships as part of something sold, is commercial use, and the API's terms don't allow it.
What does attribution look like?
Apps show "News via Hivewire" with a link wherever Service data is displayed.