No subscription, no monthly commitment, no card on file. You buy credits, they do not expire, and you spend them when you make a call. Searching is nearly free for us to serve, so most of what you pay for is article text you actually asked us to extract.
The API is live and payment works. It is new, and it is a one-person operation — which is exactly why the pricing is built so that nothing is owed if you stop using it. Questions go here and reach a person.
A credit is a tenth of a cent. One dollar buys a thousand of them — and more than a thousand once you top up more at once.
| Action | Cost | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
One search, whatever limit you ask for — up to 100 articles of headlines, sources and dates | 1 credit | $1 |
One article resolved to the publisher's real URL (resolve=true) | 4 credits | $4 |
One article whose full text we returned (content=true) | 20 credits | $20 |
| A search that returns nothing, a failed request, or an article whose text we could not get | nothing | |
| A cached result, or an article already resolved | 1 credit for the search; a resolve is never charged twice | |
The three are priced apart because they are not alike. A headline search is public — Google News publishes an RSS feed and anyone can read it in ten lines of code — so we charge nearly nothing for it and give you five thousand a month for free. Turning Google's encoded link back into the publisher's own URL is the part almost nobody does. The full text is the part you came for, and the only one that costs us real money to deliver.
No plan to choose and nothing renews. The rate is set by the size of one top-up, and the credits never expire.
| Top up | Per 1,000 full-text articles | Per 1,000 searches |
|---|---|---|
| $10 | $20.00 | $1.00 |
| $50 | $15.00 | $0.75 |
| $200 | $11.00 | $0.55 |
| $1,000 | $8.00 | $0.40 |
Four real shapes of usage, next to the cheapest thing that does the same job. Article counts are what you receive, not what you ask for.
| If you are | Per month | You pay | Nearest alternative |
|---|---|---|---|
| A side project checking a few queries a day | 300 searches, 200 articles | free | GNews €49.99 |
| Watching one topic, polling every 5 minutes, headlines only | ~8,600 searches | $6 | GNews €49.99 |
| Building retrieval: 20 searches a day, full text on 1,000 articles | ~21,000 credits | $21 | GNews €49.99 |
| Research across the archive: 50,000 full-text articles | ~1,000,000 credits | $400 at the $1,000 rate | NewsData $1,299.99 |
Your usage page shows every call and what it cost, so none of this has to be taken on trust.
Figures taken from each provider's own pricing page on 16 September 2026.
| Provider | To start paying | Archive at that price |
|---|---|---|
| NewsAPI.org | $449 / month, every month | 5 years; content "truncated to 200 chars"; the free plan "cannot be used in a staging or production environment" |
| NewsData.io | $199.99 / month | 6 months — ten years costs $1,299.99 |
| GNews | €49.99 / month | "back to 2020" |
| hawkcrawl | $10, once, no renewal | Back to 1995, with full article text |
That last one is worth reading twice. NewsAPI's free plan is for development only by its own terms, and CORS is enabled for localhost alone — so the moment your project is real, the next step is $449 a month. Ours works in production from the first call, on the free credits, with no card.
They will beat us on source counts, sentiment scoring and entity tagging — those are real features we do not have. What we are competing on is how far back you can look, how much of the article you actually get, and not owing anything in a month when you did not use it.
We return full text for 77% of the articles we find — 488 of 636, measured on 18 September 2026 across thirteen subjects and four periods, and ranging from 40% to 100% depending on the subject. The rest are paywalls, publishers that refuse machine traffic, and pages that no longer exist. You are charged for none of them, and the response says per article which you got. Every alternative bills the request either way.
Payment is in crypto through OxaPay — USDT, USDC and about thirty other coins, including networks where the fee is a few cents. There is no card checkout and no invoicing yet.
If that rules us out, say so here. Building card payment and invoicing is real cost, and we would rather do it because people asked than guess.
Every parameter, the real response shape, what each call consumes, and the failure numbers repeated wherever they matter.