Compare APITube plans: Free, Starter, Basic, Professional and Corporate#

APITube has five plans: Free ($0), Starter ($29/month), 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 five 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:

	Free	Starter	Basic	Professional	Corporate
Price (monthly)	$0	$29	$99	$199	$599
Price (annual)	—	$279	$959	$1,919	$4,999
Requests per cycle	1,000	10,000	50,000	150,000	300,000
Renewal cycle	1 day	31 days	31 days	31 days	31 days
Rate limit (live key)	10 / min	50 / min	50 / min	50 / min	50 / min
Streaming (SSE) credits	1,000	3,000	5,000	15,000	40,000
Concurrent SSE streams	1	2	2	10	50
Saved webhooks	1	5	5	20	100
Article content	Preview	Full	Full	Full	Full
Articles per request (per_page)	10	50	250	250	250
Pagination	First 5 pages	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Pay-as-you-go fallback	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fact-check endpoint	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Natural-language prompt	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

Streaming and connection figures shown are for the monthly plans. The per_page page-size cap is 250 results on Basic and up — Starter is capped at 50 and Free at 10 — asking for more returns 400 ER0171, and the default page size drops to the plan ceiling, so a Free request that omits per_page gets 10 instead of the usual 100. On Free that compounds with the 5-page cap: 5 × 10 = 50 articles is the whole reach of one query. 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 100 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: the article body and body_html come back as a preview trimmed to a marker (...[Upgrade subscription plan]) — everything else, including the link, image, description and all enrichment, is full — you can only page through the first 5 pages of a result set (a sixth page returns HTTP 400 with error ER0173), you get real-time streaming capped at one concurrent connection, and the rate limit is 10 requests per minute. For the full breakdown, read what’s included in the free plan.

Every paid plan (Starter 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, lifts streaming to more concurrent connections and larger pools, and unlocks the /v1/fact-check endpoint and the pay-as-you-go fallback. Beyond that the tiers mostly scale the same numbers, with one feature difference: the natural-language prompt parameter starts at Basic, so Free and Starter keys get 403 ER0706 when they use it.

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 except Starter (50) and Free (10) — larger pages, not more calls, is the cheapest way to pull data. See how requests and credits work.

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

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

• Starter — $29/month. 10,000 requests per 31-day cycle, 3,000 streaming credits, up to 2 concurrent SSE streams, 5 saved webhooks, and up to 50 articles per request. The cheapest tier with full article content, the 50/min rate limit and fact-check. The natural-language prompt parameter is not included. Sized for a first production integration.
• Basic — $99/month. 50,000 requests per 31-day cycle, 5,000 streaming credits, up to 2 concurrent SSE streams, and 5 saved webhooks. Same connection and webhook limits as Starter — what you gain is the larger request and streaming pools, the full 250 articles per request, and the natural-language prompt parameter.
• Professional — $199/month. 150,000 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 — Starter at $279/year, 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.

Common Questions#

• Does the Free plan expire or require a card?
• Do all plans share the same rate limit?
• Can I use fact-check on any plan?
• Which plans include the natural-language prompt parameter?
• Is there an annual discount?

Does the Free plan expire or require a card?#

No card is needed to use the Free plan. Its 100-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 Starter, Basic, Professional and Corporate. Note that fact-check costs 5 requests per call rather than 1, because it runs a retrieval-and-reasoning pass.

Which plans include the natural-language prompt parameter?#

Basic, Professional and Corporate. The prompt parameter — the one that turns “Tesla news in English for the last 10 days” into real filters — returns 403 ER0706 on Free and Starter, and nothing is charged for the refused request. It sits one tier higher than fact-check, which starts at Starter. The filters it produces are not gated at all: title, organization.name, published_at.start and the rest work on every plan if you write them yourself, and a translation costs 2 points on top of the request on the plans that have it.

Is there an annual discount?#

Yes. Starter, Basic, Professional and Corporate can be billed annually at $279, $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 — annual Starter, for example, carries 10,000 streaming credits instead of 3,000.