How many free APIs are actually dead?

In our latest run, 257 of 1,895 checked entries had official sites that no longer respond — roughly one in seven. The full, dated results live on the status board.

What does "verified" mean on this site?

We called the API’s real endpoint and it answered. The status, response time and a captured sample of the actual response are published on its page.

How often do you re-check?

Weekly. Statuses and samples refresh, and previously dead APIs can come back — the date on every listing tells you how fresh its check is.

We Checked 1,895 Free APIs. 257 Were Already Dead.

The short answer: the world's most popular free-API list is quietly rotting. We took the open public-apis dataset (1,895 entries), ran a real check on every single one, and found 257 whose official sites no longer answer at all. Of our curated core, 81 APIs passed a full live endpoint test — with the actual responses published as proof. Everything below is the receipts.

Why lists rot

A list is a snapshot; APIs are living things. Startups fold, side projects lose their hosting, free tiers get acquired into oblivion. A list that never re-checks becomes a museum — and the famous GitHub list, for all its 443,000 stars, is a README: nobody's job is to go back and delete the dead. So developers learn an API from a tutorial, wire it into a weekend project, and discover at deploy time that it died in 2023.

How we checked (steal this method)

Endpoint test for our curated core: a real GET request to a documented sample endpoint, one retry, status + response time + the response body itself captured and published.
Link check for the wider catalog: the official site must answer (2xx/3xx, or a login/protection response that proves the service exists). Silence, 404s and 5xx after retries = dropped, not listed.
No mercy rule: if it fails, it shows — our own favorites included.

The results

Endpoint-verified LIVE ............ 81
Free-key tier (verified listing) .. 25
Verified core, currently DOWN ..... 5
Listed tier (link-checked) ........ 1527
Dead links dropped ................ 257
Total published ................... 1638

The fastest verified API answered in 517 ms (JSONPlaceholder); the slowest survivor took 2688 ms (QRServer QR Codes). The public status board has every number, fastest first.

The casualties hurt

Some names on the down list sting: beloved community APIs timing out, a famous unofficial space API returning 522, a certain anime database too overloaded to answer a single call in 25 seconds. We keep them listed — flagged in red, with the date — because a directory that hides its dead is just marketing. When they recover, the weekly run will say so.

Honest limitations (read this before quoting us)

We check from one network. Geo-blocked APIs (exchanges answering 451) can look dead to us and alive to you.
Shared-IP rate limits bite: NASA's DEMO_KEY allows 30 calls/hour per IP, and our own repeated testing can exhaust it — a "down" that is really a "throttled".
A 200 response proves an API answers, not that its data is good. Data quality is the next frontier of this project.

What happens next

The check re-runs weekly. Listed APIs graduate to endpoint-verified, the dead either resurrect or fall off, and this post's numbers get refreshed. If you maintain an API on this list: grab your live-verified badge — it only ever shows what our latest check found. If you found a dead one we missed, tell us. The graveyard ends here.