Legend

Quick Start by Language

How to call a JSON API in each major student language. Examples use the wttr.in weather API (no key needed).

JavaScript (Browser / Node.js)

const res = await fetch("https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1");
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data.current_condition[0].temp_C);

PHP

<?php
$json = file_get_contents("https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1");
$data = json_decode($json, true);
echo $data["current_condition"][0]["temp_C"];

With Guzzle (Laravel / modern PHP):

use GuzzleHttp\Client;
$client = new Client();
$response = $client->get("https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1");
$data = json_decode($response->getBody(), true);
echo $data["current_condition"][0]["temp_C"];

Python

import requests
r = requests.get("https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1")
data = r.json()
print(data["current_condition"][0]["temp_C"])

C# / .NET

using System.Net.Http;
using System.Text.Json;

var client = new HttpClient();
var json = await client.GetStringAsync("https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1");
var doc = JsonDocument.Parse(json);
var temp = doc.RootElement
    .GetProperty("current_condition")[0]
    .GetProperty("temp_C").GetString();
Console.WriteLine(temp);

Go

package main

import (
    "encoding/json"
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    resp, _ := http.Get("https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1")
    defer resp.Body.Close()
    var data map[string]interface{}
    json.NewDecoder(resp.Body).Decode(&data)
    cond := data["current_condition"].([]interface{})[0].(map[string]interface{})
    fmt.Println(cond["temp_C"])
}

Java

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpClient;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse;

HttpClient client = HttpClient.newHttpClient();
HttpRequest req = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
    .uri(URI.create("https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1"))
    .build();
HttpResponse<String> res = client.send(req, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString());
System.out.println(res.body());

APIs by Category

Weather

• 🆓🏆 wttr.in — Get the weather for any city as JSON, plain text, or ASCII art. No API key, no signup, just https://wttr.in/Manila?format=j1.
• 🔑🏆 OpenWeatherMap — Free tier: 1,000 calls/day. Current weather, forecast, historical data. The default choice for weather projects.
• 🔑 WeatherAPI.com — Free tier: 1M calls/month. More generous than OpenWeatherMap.
• 🆓 Open-Meteo — Free non-commercial weather API. No key required, includes forecasts and historical data.
• 🆓 7Timer! — Free weather forecast for stargazing, civil aviation, agriculture.

Geocoding & Maps

• 🆓🏆 Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) — Free geocoding and reverse geocoding. Be respectful — max 1 req/sec.
• 🔑 OpenCage Geocoding — 2,500 free requests/day. Cleaner JSON than Nominatim.
• 🆓 REST Countries — Country info: capital, population, currencies, flags, languages.
• 🆓 IP-API — Free IP geolocation. 45 requests/minute. No key.
• 🆓 ipapi.co — IP-based geolocation. Free for 1,000 requests/day.
• 🔑 Mapbox — 50,000 map loads/month free. Maps, geocoding, directions, isochrones.

Currency & Finance

• 🔑🏆 ExchangeRate-API — 1,500 currency requests/month free. Reliable.
• 🆓 Frankfurter — Currency conversion using ECB data. No key, no limits documented.
• 🆓 CoinGecko — Free crypto API: prices, market cap, history. 10-30 calls/minute.
• 🔑 Polygon.io — Stock market data. Free tier: 5 API calls/min.
• 🔑 Alpha Vantage — Stocks, forex, crypto. 25 requests/day free.
• 🔑 Finnhub — Stocks and economic data. 60 calls/minute free.

News

• 🔑🏆 NewsAPI — Free for development: 100 requests/day. Headlines from 80,000+ sources.
• 🆓 GNews — 100 requests/day free.
• 🆓 The Guardian Open Platform — Generous free tier with full article content.
• 🆓 Reddit JSON API — Append .json to any Reddit URL — instant JSON. No auth for read.
• 🆓 Hacker News API — Stories, comments, users. No key.

Sports

• 🆓🏆 TheSportsDB — Football, basketball, NFL, esports. Free tier with key 3.
• 🆓 Football-data.org — Football fixtures and standings. 10 calls/minute free.
• 🆓 NBA Stats (unofficial) — Wraps the official NBA endpoints.
• 🔑 API-Football — 100 requests/day free.

Food & Recipes

• 🆓🏆 TheMealDB — Free recipes, ingredients, categories. Test key 1.
• 🆓 TheCocktailDB — Cocktail recipes from the same maintainer as TheMealDB.
• 🔑 Spoonacular — 150 requests/day free. Recipe search, nutrition, meal planning.
• 🆓 Open Food Facts — Crowdsourced food product database. Scan a barcode, get the data.
• 🆓 Edamam Recipe Search — 5 requests/minute free.

Entertainment & Media

• 🔑🏆 TMDB (The Movie DB) — Movies, TV shows, cast, posters. Generous free tier — the go-to for movie apps.
• 🆓 OMDb — Movie info via title search. 1,000 requests/day free.
• 🆓 Jikan (MyAnimeList) — Anime and manga data. No key, rate-limited.
• 🆓 AniList GraphQL — GraphQL API for anime/manga.
• 🆓 Spotify Web API — Music metadata, playlists. Requires OAuth but free.
• 🆓 Deezer — Music tracks, artists, albums. No auth for public data.
• 🆓 Giphy — GIFs. Free with API key.
• 🆓 Pexels — Free stock photos and videos. Free with API key.
• 🆓 Unsplash — High-quality free photos. 50 requests/hour on demo tier.

Education & Books

• 🆓🏆 Open Library — Books, authors, covers. No key. Great for library apps.
• 🆓 Google Books — Search 40M+ books. Free.
• 🆓 Project Gutenberg (Gutendex) — 70,000+ free ebooks via JSON API.
• 🆓 Numbers API — Trivia, math, date facts about any number.
• 🆓 Dictionary API — Free English dictionary with definitions, examples, audio.
• 🆓 Wikipedia REST API — Search Wikipedia, get summaries, page HTML.
• 🆓 CollegeFootballData — College football stats and games.

AI & Machine Learning

• 💳🏆 Hugging Face Inference API — Free tier for many models: text gen, classification, image gen.
• 💳 Google Gemini API — Generous free tier for text + multimodal models.
• 💳 Groq — Free tier with very fast inference on Llama / Mixtral models.
• 💳 OpenAI — Pay as you go, $5 free credit on signup (subject to change).
• 💳 Anthropic Claude API — High-quality models with a free trial.
• 🆓 Cloudflare Workers AI — Free quota of LLM/image inference.
• 🆓 DeepL Translate — 500,000 chars/month free. Higher quality than Google Translate for many language pairs.

Government & Open Data

• 🆓 NASA Open APIs — Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), Mars rover photos, asteroids. Demo key works for testing.
• 🆓 USGS Earthquake — Real-time and historical earthquake data.
• 🆓 Data.gov — US government open datasets across hundreds of agencies.
• 🆓 World Bank Open Data — Country-level economic indicators.
• 🆓 WHO GHO — World Health Organization global health observatory data.

Philippines-Specific

• 🆓 PSGC API — Philippine Standard Geographic Code: regions, provinces, cities, barangays. Essential for any PH address form.
• 🆓 Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Reference Exchange Rates — Official PHP exchange rates.
• 🆓 PAGASA Weather — Philippine weather and typhoon tracking (scrape-friendly RSS / data feeds).
• 🆓 Phividec / DOST APIs — Various PH government datasets.

Random & Fun

• 🆓🏆 JSONPlaceholder — Fake REST API for testing and prototyping. The first API every student should hit.
• 🆓 Pokémon API — All Pokémon data ever. Most popular learning API on GitHub.
• 🆓 Star Wars API (SWAPI) — Star Wars films, characters, planets.
• 🆓 Rick and Morty API — Characters, episodes, locations.