APITube Help Center

Compare APITube Plans: Free, Basic, Professional, Corporate

Side-by-side pricing, request quotas, streaming allowance, webhooks and rate limits for every APITube tier

Brian Hollis

Written by Brian Hollis

July 4, 2026

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Compare APITube plans: Free, Basic, Professional and Corporate

APITube has four plans: Free ($0), Basic ($99/month), Professional ($199/month) and Corporate ($599/month). They all reach the same search and retrieval endpoints — what changes between them is how many requests you get, how much of each article you can read, how many real-time streams and webhooks you can run, and how fast you may call the API. This page lays out every tier side by side so you can match a plan to your workload.

What do the four APITube plans cost and include?

Each plan gives you a monthly pool of requests (the API calls these points), a separate streaming allowance, and its own connection, webhook and rate limits. Here is the full comparison:

FreeBasicProfessionalCorporate
Price (monthly)$0$99$199$599
Price (annual)$959$1,919$4,999
Requests per cycle20020,00050,000300,000
Renewal cycle1 day31 days31 days31 days
Rate limit (live key)10 / min50 / min50 / min50 / min
Streaming (SSE) credits05,00015,00040,000
Concurrent SSE streams021050
Saved webhooks1520100
Article contentPreviewFullFullFull
PaginationFirst 5 pagesUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited
Pay-as-you-go fallbackNoYesYesYes
Fact-check endpointNoYesYesYes

Streaming and connection figures shown are for the monthly plans; the per_page page-size cap is 250 results on every plan, including Free. If you are still weighing which tier fits, see which plan is right for me.

What is the difference between the Free and paid plans?

The Free plan is built for evaluation. It costs $0, gives you 200 requests on a fast 1-day renewal cycle, and reaches every search and retrieval endpoint against the real live index — it is not a separate sandbox. Its trade-offs are the limits people hit first: article body, body_html and description come back as a preview trimmed to a marker (...[Upgrade subscription plan]), you can only page through the first 5 pages of a result set (a sixth page returns HTTP 400 with error ER0173), you get no real-time streaming, and the rate limit is 10 requests per minute. For the full breakdown, read what’s included in the free plan.

Every paid plan (Basic and up) removes the content preview when you use a live key, lifts the 5-page cap, raises the rate limit to 50 requests per minute, and unlocks real-time streaming, the /v1/fact-check endpoint, and the pay-as-you-go fallback. The tiers differ only in how large the pools and limits are.

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?title=electric%20vehicles&per_page=250&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

That single call returns up to 250 articles for one request on any plan — larger pages, not more calls, is the cheapest way to pull data. See how requests and credits work.

Which paid plan should you pick — Basic, Professional or Corporate?

The three paid tiers scale the same set of numbers, so pick by the biggest constraint in your workload:

  • Basic — $99/month. 20,000 requests per 31-day cycle, 5,000 streaming credits, up to 2 concurrent SSE streams, and 5 saved webhooks. Full article content and the 50/min rate limit. Good for a single production integration or a light monitoring feed.
  • Professional — $199/month. 50,000 requests, 15,000 streaming credits, up to 10 concurrent SSE streams, and 20 saved webhooks. The step up when one Basic pool or two streams are not enough.
  • Corporate — $599/month. 300,000 requests, 40,000 streaming credits, up to 50 concurrent SSE streams, and 100 saved webhooks. Built for high-volume pipelines and many parallel feeds.

Each tier is also available billed annually — Basic at $959/year, Professional at $1,919/year and Corporate at $4,999/year — which is lower than paying the monthly price twelve times.

What happens when a plan runs out of requests?

When your request pool reaches zero, the next billed call returns 402 with error ER0176 (You have no points on your account). What happens next depends on your plan. On a paid plan, if you have a pay-as-you-go balance, the request is instead charged to that balance at $0.01 per request so the call succeeds — the minimum top-up is $1, which buys 100 requests. The Free plan has no pay-as-you-go fallback, so requests simply resume when the 1-day cycle renews, or immediately if you upgrade.

Rate limits are per plan, not flat: a Free live key is capped at 10 requests per minute, while a paid live key gets 50 per minute. Test keys are held to 15/min on any plan, and the /v1/fact-check endpoint has its own 10/min cap. Exceeding a limit returns 429 ER0203; repeat abuse (30 violations) triggers a temporary ban with 429 ER0204.

Common Questions

Does the Free plan expire or require a card?

No card is needed to use the Free plan. Its 200-request allowance renews on a 1-day cycle rather than the 31-day cycle of the paid plans, so it is a small, frequently-refreshing pool for testing rather than a monthly quota. You only pay when you upgrade or add a pay-as-you-go balance.

Do all plans share the same rate limit?

No. Rate limits vary by plan and key type: a Free live key is limited to 10 requests per minute, every paid live key gets 50 per minute, and test keys on any plan get 15 per minute. These are the standard production values; the ban after 30 violations (ER0204) is the same across plans.

Can I use fact-check on any plan?

No. The /v1/fact-check endpoint is disabled on the Free plan — calling it there returns 403 with error ER0706 (Fact-check is not available on the free plan). It works on Basic, Professional and Corporate. Note that fact-check costs 5 requests per call rather than 1, because it runs a retrieval-and-reasoning pass.

Is there an annual discount?

Yes. Basic, Professional and Corporate can be billed annually at $959, $1,919 and $4,999 per year, each lower than twelve monthly payments. The request and connection limits stay the same as the monthly plan; annual plans include a larger streaming allowance.


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