Mediastack
apilayer news API with commercial plans from $24.99
Founded: 2015 | Vienna, Austria (apilayer); owned by Idera | Team: Part of Idera
Headlines & metadataHistorical archive
What is Mediastack?
Mediastack belongs to apilayer, the Vienna company behind ipstack and weatherstack, which Julian and Paul Zehetmayr founded in 2015 and the US software group Idera bought in January 2021. If you already use another apilayer API, the key format, parameters and error codes will look familiar. It covers live and historical news from 7,500+ sources in 13 languages, with filters for country, category, language and keyword. The free plan gives 100 requests a month, which a day of testing can use up, and paid plans run from $24.99 for 10,000 requests to $249.99 for 250,000. Responses carry descriptions and metadata, without full text or enrichment.
Typical uses: News & content apps, Marketing & PR. What sets it apart: Commercial use and historical news from $24.99 a month.
What does the Mediastack API include?
REST APIJSON
| Capability |
|---|
| Headlines & metadata |
| Historical archive |
Mediastack pricing
Short answer: the pricing model is monthly request plans. Entry price: $24.99/mo.
| Access model | What it means |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Permanent free allowance, usually with request, history or commercial-use limits |
| Monthly plans | Self-serve subscription with published quotas |
API prices and quotas change often. Check Mediastack's own pricing page before you commit, and confirm that your use is covered by the licence.
Mediastack pros and cons
| Advantages | Things to consider |
|---|---|
| +Among the lowest paid entry prices for general news | -100 free requests a month barely covers testing |
| +Shares conventions with the other apilayer APIs | -Only 7,500 sources in 13 languages |
| +History included on paid plans | -No full text, entities or sentiment |
| +Short docs with copy-paste code |
Mediastack vs alternatives
How Mediastack compares to the other top News APIs.
| API | Best for | Key difference | Rating | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsCatcher | Developers who want clean, deduplicated news without writing... | Summaries, story clusters, entities and geotags arrive in the response, so the processing code you would otherwise write is already done | 4.7 | Full comparison |
| NewsData.io | Developers who want a working news call within... | A free allowance that refills daily, with country and language filters on every plan | 4.6 | Full comparison |
| Perigon | Indie developers and startups wanting enriched data at... | Entity, topic and cluster data from the $25 plan up, with all tiers priced publicly | 4.5 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry) | Developers building multilingual event or research tools. | Event records that join coverage of one story across languages | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| GNews | Small commercial apps needing a cheap, simple news... | Commercial rights and full article content for under €50 a month | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| Webz.io | Data engineers backfilling years of news for datasets. | History back to 2008 and the widest claimed source count here | 4.2 | Full comparison |
| Exa | RAG and agent developers needing semantic news retrieval. | Search by meaning with page text returned in the same request | 4.2 | Full comparison |
| Tavily | Agent builders adding a news tool in a... | Built-in LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations that return prompt-ready text | 4.1 | Full comparison |
| World News API | Location-aware apps on a small budget. | Latitude, longitude and radius filters from the $39 plan, plus a URL text extractor | 4.1 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.org | Learning projects and prototypes that follow existing tutorials. | The largest pile of tutorials, wrappers and answered questions of any news API | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| SerpApi Google News | Developers who need exactly what Google News ranks. | Google News rankings and story groupings as structured JSON | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| GDELT Project | Zero-budget data projects and research prototypes. | No key, no fee and global coverage refreshed every 15 minutes | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Brave Search API | Developers replacing Bing News Search with an independent... | Results from its own crawler, independent of Google and Bing | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Serper Google News | Agent prototypes needing cheap Google News lookups. | About $1 per 1,000 Google queries on the entry pack, by third-party figures | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Marketaux | Fintech developers needing ticker-tagged news cheaply. | Entity-level sentiment on every article, free plan included | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Alpha Vantage News & Sentiment | Hobby quants wanting news sentiment beside price data. | Ticker and topic sentiment scores from the same key as market data | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Massive (ex-Polygon.io) News | Trading-app developers already using Polygon or Massive data. | Per-ticker sentiment with a written reason, included in stock data plans | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Guardian Open Platform | Students and researchers needing free full-text articles. | Free full article bodies from a major newspaper, with editorial tags | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Diffbot | Developers collecting news from a fixed list of... | Parser-free extraction from any article URL, linked to a Knowledge Graph | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| Finnhub | Personal fintech projects needing news and prices from... | A 60-calls-a-minute free key covering company news and market data | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| DataForSEO Google News | High-volume Google News rank tracking on a budget. | About $0.60 per 1,000 Google News result pages in the Standard queue | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| TheNewsAPI | Personal dashboards needing a cheap general feed. | Possibly the lowest paid entry price here, if third-party pricing is current | 3.6 | Full comparison |
| NYT Developer APIs | Students and historians working with Times metadata. | Searchable headlines and abstracts for every Times issue since 1851 | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| Benzinga | Trading platforms needing a licensed market newswire. | Original market headlines with ratings and earnings events in one feed | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| Quantexa News API (Aylien) | Teams maintaining an existing Aylien integration. | Aylien's fine-grained entity and category tagging | 3.4 | Full comparison |
| APITube | Developers comparing coverage in a side-by-side trial. | Sentiment and entity filters offered on lower tiers | 3.4 | Full comparison |
| Currents API | Coursework and hackathons needing a free feed. | A free tier that tutorials and roundups often recommend | 3.3 | Full comparison |
Mediastack FAQ
What is Mediastack?
apilayer news API with commercial plans from $24.99
How much does Mediastack charge?
Pricing model: monthly request plans. The cheapest paid access listed is $24.99/mo. Free access: yes, with limits.
Which formats and SDKs does Mediastack support?
Mediastack offers REST API, JSON.
Is Mediastack right for enterprise?
Mediastack lists no enterprise contract, so check SLA and support terms first. Main caveat: 100 free requests a month barely covers testing.
What are the best Mediastack alternatives?
The best alternatives to Mediastack depend on your use case. Top options are:
- NewsCatcher: summaries, story clusters, entities and geotags arrive in the response, so the processing code you would otherwise write is already done
- NewsData.io: a free allowance that refills daily, with country and language filters on every plan
- Perigon: entity, topic and cluster data from the $25 plan up, with all tiers priced publicly
Compare Mediastack with other News APIs
Mediastack vs NewsCatcher Mediastack vs NewsData.io Mediastack vs Perigon Mediastack vs NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry) Mediastack vs GNews Mediastack vs Webz.io Mediastack vs Exa Mediastack vs Tavily Mediastack vs World News API Mediastack vs NewsAPI.org Mediastack vs SerpApi Google News Mediastack vs GDELT Project Mediastack vs Brave Search API Mediastack vs Serper Google News Mediastack vs Marketaux Mediastack vs Alpha Vantage News & Sentiment Mediastack vs Massive (ex-Polygon.io) News Mediastack vs Guardian Open Platform Mediastack vs Diffbot Mediastack vs Finnhub Mediastack vs DataForSEO Google News Mediastack vs TheNewsAPI Mediastack vs NYT Developer APIs Mediastack vs Benzinga Mediastack vs Quantexa News API (Aylien) Mediastack vs APITube Mediastack vs Currents API
Verify all details directly with Mediastack before making a decision.