Which APITube plan is right for me?#

Pick your plan by how many requests you make and whether you need real-time delivery. Free (200 requests) is for evaluating the API. Basic ($99/mo, 20,000 requests) suits a small production app. Professional ($199/mo, 50,000 requests) handles serious traffic and heavier streaming. Corporate ($599/mo, 300,000 requests) is for high-volume and multi-team use. If you only sometimes exceed your quota, stay on a smaller plan and let Pay As You Go cover the overflow.

The plans differ on four things: how many requests you get, your streaming allowance, how many concurrent streams you can open, and how many webhooks you can run. They do not differ on rate limit or which endpoints you can call — those are the same on every plan, with one exception noted below.

How do the APITube plans compare?#

Plan	Price	Requests included	Streaming credits	Concurrent streams	Webhooks
Free	$0	200	0	0	1
Basic	$99 / mo	20,000	5,000	2	5
Professional	$199 / mo	50,000	15,000	10	20
Corporate	$599 / mo	300,000	40,000	50	100

“Requests included” is your allowance per billing cycle (one request = one credit, and most search and retrieval calls cost a single credit — see what counts as one request). “Streaming credits” is a separate pool for the SSE and WebSocket feeds, which bill per article delivered. “Concurrent streams” is how many live SSE/WebSocket connections you can hold open at once, and “Webhooks” is how many push subscriptions you can run.

Paid plans renew on a 31-day cycle. The Free plan has a short 1-day validity, so its 200-request allowance is sized for testing, not production.

Which plan should you choose?#

• Free — choose it to try the API, prototype, or run a tiny side project. You get 200 requests and one webhook, but no real-time streaming (a paid-plan feature), article bodies are truncated (see below) and fact-check is off.
• Basic — choose it for a small but real production workload: roughly 20,000 requests per cycle, full article content, two concurrent streams and up to five webhooks. Good for a single app or dashboard.
• Professional — choose it when traffic grows past Basic or you lean on real-time: 50,000 requests, a much larger 15,000 streaming pool, ten concurrent streams and twenty webhooks.
• Corporate — choose it for high-volume pipelines, agencies or multiple teams: 300,000 requests, 40,000 streaming credits, fifty concurrent streams and a hundred webhooks.

A simple rule: size the plan to the request volume you expect in a cycle, then check the streaming and webhook columns cover your real-time needs. If requests are your only concern and you rarely stream, the request count alone decides it.

What is the same on every plan?#

Upgrading does not raise your rate limit. The rate limit is 50 requests per minute on paid plans — the Free plan is capped at 10/min and test keys at 15/min — and exceeding it repeatedly triggers a temporary ban. So a higher plan gives you a larger monthly allowance and more streams/webhooks — not a faster burst rate. For the details, see understanding rate limits.

Every plan can also call the same endpoints — search, headlines, local, single article, story clusters, count, trends, directories and exports all work everywhere. The one feature gated behind a paid plan is fact-check (/v1/fact-check): on Free it returns 403 ER0706 (“Fact-check is not available on the free plan”), so you need Basic or higher to use it.

Why is article content cut off on the Free plan?#

On the Free plan, article bodies are truncated and replaced with an [Upgrade subscription plan] marker instead of the full text. This is intentional: Free is a preview tier, so you can see the structure of every article object — title, source, language, sentiment, entities, dates — but not the complete body. The same truncation applies to test keys. To get full, untruncated article content, move to any paid plan (Basic, Professional or Corporate) and use a live key. The behaviour is the same idea as test keys vs live keys.

What about annual billing and overflow?#

Basic, Professional and Corporate are also available annually, billed once a year for less than twelve monthly payments — Basic is $959/year, Professional $1,919/year and Corporate $4,999/year — with the same request allowance and a larger streaming pool. Annual plans renew every 366 days instead of every 31.

For requests beyond your plan, you do not have to jump to a bigger tier: Pay As You Go tops up an overflow balance at $0.01 per request ($1 = 100 requests). Your plan quota is always spent first, and only overflow draws from the balance — see what is Pay As You Go. This lets a smaller plan absorb the occasional busy day without an upgrade.

Common Questions#

• Does a bigger plan give me a higher rate limit?
• What happens when I run out of requests?
• Can I start on Free and upgrade later?
• Do I have to upgrade to handle a traffic spike?

Does a bigger plan give me a higher rate limit?#

No. The rate limit is 50 requests per minute on the paid plans (Basic, Professional and Corporate); the Free plan is capped at 10 per minute. A higher plan increases your total monthly request allowance, streaming credits, concurrent streams and webhook count, but not the per-minute burst rate. If you hit 429 errors, the fix is spacing out requests, not upgrading.

What happens when I run out of requests?#

Once your plan allowance for the cycle is spent, the next billed call returns 402 ER0176 unless you have a Pay As You Go balance to cover it. With a balance, overflow requests bill at $0.01 each and keep working. For the full out-of-quota behaviour, see what happens when you run out of requests.

Can I start on Free and upgrade later?#

Yes. Free is designed for evaluation, so a normal path is to build and test on Free (with truncated content), then move to a paid plan when you need full article bodies, more requests, fact-check, or more streams and webhooks. Your API keys stay the same; only the plan attached to your account changes.

Do I have to upgrade to handle a traffic spike?#

Not necessarily. If you are usually within your plan but occasionally exceed it, Pay As You Go covers the overflow at $0.01 per request, so a one-off busy period does not force a permanent upgrade. Upgrade when your baseline usage consistently sits above your plan’s included requests, not for rare peaks.