What’s included in the free plan?#

The APITube free plan costs $0 and gives you 100 requests per day and one webhook. Real-time streaming (SSE/WebSocket) is available with one concurrent connection each, funded by 1,000 SSE and 1,000 WebSocket deliveries per day; paid plans raise both. It reaches every search and retrieval endpoint and returns complete articles — link, image, description, source and all NLP enrichment — with one exception: the article body comes back as a 200-character preview. You can also page through only the first 5 pages of any result set. It is built for evaluating the API and wiring up an integration; a paid plan removes the body preview and raises every limit.

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?title=Apple&api_key=YOUR_FREE_KEY"

That call runs against the full live index and returns real, matching articles — the free plan is not a separate sandbox. What differs from a paid plan is how much you can pull and how much of each article’s text you see.

What do you get on the free plan?#

The free plan unlocks the whole API surface at no cost, with these allowances:

• 100 requests per day — your standard request pool (the API calls these points). Each billed call spends one, exactly like a paid plan.
• Streaming (one connection) — the free plan can hold one concurrent SSE and one WebSocket connection, funded by 1,000 SSE and 1,000 WebSocket deliveries per day; paid plans raise both.
• One live SSE stream — the free plan can open one live /v1/news/stream connection at a time; a second returns ER0360. Paid plans allow more concurrent streams.
• 1 webhook — you can save one webhook subscription.
• Search & retrieval endpoints — search, top headlines, single-article lookup, story clusters, counts, trends and the directories all work on the free plan. Two extras do not: /v1/fact-check (paid plans only) and the natural-language prompt parameter (Basic and up). Both return 403 ER0706 on a free key, and neither is charged when refused.
• per_page up to 10 — the free plan returns at most 10 articles per request (Starter 50, Basic and up 250). Asking for more returns ER0171, and a free request that omits per_page gets 10 rather than the usual default of 100.

The 100-request pool runs on a short 1-day cycle (validity_days: 1), where paid monthly plans use a 31-day cycle. So the free plan is a small, fast-renewing allowance rather than a large monthly one. For how the request pools work in detail, see how requests and credits work.

Why is article content truncated on the free plan?#

On the free plan the API returns the article body as a preview, not in full. body and body_html are cut to the first 200 characters and tagged with ...[Upgrade subscription plan]. Nothing else is trimmed: href, image, description, the source domain and every URL come back complete, so free-plan articles are readable and clickable. This is expected behaviour, not an error — the HTTP status is still 200 and the articles are real.

Everything else is not trimmed. The title, description, href, image, source details, entities, categories, topics, sentiment scores, readability, published_at and language all come back complete, so you can build and ship a working prototype on the free plan and only miss the full body text.

{
    "title": "Apple reports record quarterly revenue",
    "href": "https://example.com/apple-record-quarter",
    "description": "Apple posted its strongest December quarter to date, driven by iPhone and services revenue.",
    "body": "Apple Inc. said on Thursday that revenue rose across every product...(+1962 chars hidden)...[Upgrade subscription plan]"
}

The same preview also applies to test keys. For the full field-by-field breakdown of what gets masked, see why are my results masked or placeholder text.

How many results can you retrieve on the free plan?#

The free plan is capped at the first 5 pages of any query, and each page holds at most 10 articles. Asking for page 6 or higher returns HTTP 400 with error ER0173 (Free plan is limited to the first 5 pages. Upgrade your subscription plan to paginate further.), and asking for per_page above 10 returns ER0171. The two limits multiply: 5 pages × 10 articles means a free key can reach at most 50 articles per query.

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?title=Tesla&per_page=10&page=5&api_key=YOUR_FREE_KEY"

Page 5 with per_page=10 is the deepest a free-plan request can go — articles 41 to 50 of the result set. To reach more of a large result set, upgrade to a paid plan: that lifts both the page cap and the 10-article page size.

What happens when the free requests run out?#

When your 100-request pool reaches zero, the next billed call returns 402 with error ER0176. The free plan has no pay-as-you-go fallback — that cash-balance overflow is a paid-plan feature — so requests resume when your quota renews on the next cycle, or immediately if you upgrade. A search that matches nothing is not charged, so retrying a zero-result query to refine filters is free. See what happens when you run out of requests.

Test keys (prefix api_test_) are a useful companion here: they hit the live API but never draw down your 100-request pool, so you can keep prototyping request shapes without spending free quota. The trade-off is that test keys also preview content, just like the free plan.

How to unlock full content and more quota#

To remove the preview and the page cap, move to a paid plan and use a live key (prefix api_live_). On a paid plan the body, body_html, description and URLs come back in full, the 5-page limit is lifted, per_page rises to 50 (Starter) or 250 (Basic and up), the request and streaming pools are much larger, and you can hold more concurrent SSE connections and save more webhooks. To pick the right tier, see which plan is right for me.

Common Questions#

• Does the free plan cost anything?
• Can I see full article text on the free plan?
• Why do I get an error asking for page 6?
• How often does the free quota renew?

Does the free plan cost anything?#

No. The free plan is $0 — there is no charge and no card required to make requests within its 100-request daily allowance. You only pay when you upgrade to a paid plan or add a pay-as-you-go balance, and pay-as-you-go itself is a paid-plan feature.

Can I see full article text on the free plan?#

No. On the free plan the body, body_html and description are trimmed to a 200-character preview ending in ...[Upgrade subscription plan]. The headline, entities, sentiment and other structured fields are complete, but the full article text requires a live key on a paid plan.

Why do I get an error asking for page 6?#

Because the free plan is limited to the first 5 pages of results. Requesting page=6 or higher returns HTTP 400 with ER0173. The filter still matched — you have simply reached the free-plan pagination cap. The free page size is already at its ceiling of 10, so those five pages hold 50 articles at most — narrow the query with filters, or upgrade to page deeper and pull larger pages.

How often does the free quota renew?#

The free plan’s 100-request allowance runs on a 1-day cycle (validity_days: 1), unlike the 31-day cycle of the monthly paid plans. So it is a small, frequently-renewing pool rather than a large monthly one — good for light, ongoing testing, not for pulling large datasets in one go.