Listen Notes API pricing on 5 September 2026 is three published SKUs: Free at $0 for 300 requests per month, Pro at a $200 base once at least one successful call is used (5,000 requests included), and Enterprise as an annual quote that starts at a guaranteed 35,000 requests. Overage on Pro is $1.60 per extra 1,000 from 5,000 to 1,000,000, then $1.30 to 5,000,000, then $1.10. Zero-usage Pro months bill $0. Trends MCP does not replace that directory. It wins the other job: a live Spotify Top Podcasts board plus paste-ready Cursor JSON (url, transport: http, Bearer) at $0 / $19 / $49 / $199.
What Listen Notes publishes for Free, Pro, and Enterprise
The Listen API pricing page (accessed 5 September 2026) lists Free, Pro, and Enterprise. Schema.org on that page prices Free at 0.00 and Pro at 200.00 in USD. Enterprise is a sales quote, not a self-serve number.
| Plan | Published price | Included requests | What happens after the cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 / month | 300 / month | Service suspends until the next cycle (HTTP 429). No card required. |
| Pro | $0 if 0 requests; $200 base if 1+ requests | 5,000 / month | Tiered overage per extra 1,000. |
| Enterprise | Annual contract, invoice | Quote; FAQ floor is 35,000+ / month | Volume discount; custom terms. |
The same pricing table prints a live catalog ticker: 3,807,270 podcasts, 193,627,991 episodes, and 13,525 companies or developers. The general FAQ page, fetched the same day, still writes 3,807,262 podcasts and 193,626,833 episodes. Treat the pricing ticker as the page a buyer sees at checkout, and treat the FAQ counts as a second official print that has not caught up.
Free is labeled for personal pet projects. After 300 successful calls, Listen Notes suspends the key until the cycle resets. The billing FAQ says the key itself stays valid unless it is reset. Production traffic that cannot tolerate a mid-month 429 needs Pro before launch. That is the vendor's own warning on the pricing grid.
Pro is the self-serve production SKU. The base fee is $200 for any month with at least one counted request. The included bucket is 5,000. Extra calls are billed per 1,000: $1.60 from 5,000 through 1,000,000, $1.30 from 1,000,000 through 5,000,000, and $1.10 above 5,000,000. Listen Notes also posts a mailto on the Pro column for reduced-quota deals (the copy names entrepreneurs in developing countries and pre-revenue bootstrapped startups). That is a sales exception, not a published fourth tier.
Enterprise is annual. The billing FAQ (accessed 5 September 2026) lists a guaranteed monthly quota of 35,000 or more, a once-a-year invoice, no "Powered by Listen Notes" logo, a relaxed server-side caching policy, and phone support. The sales path is: send a minimum monthly quota, receive a quote and contract, pay the annual fee, then get the account switched.
What a Pro month actually bills
Counted usage is narrower than "every HTTP hit." The billing FAQ states that only successful responses (HTTP 200) increment the meter. HEAD checks do not count. Images, audio files, and webhook deliveries do not count. A request is one successful call to any documented endpoint.
Zero usage is a real SKU, not folklore. Effective 18 January 2023, a Pro cycle with 0 requests bills $0. The FAQ's own examples: 500 requests costs $200; 0 requests costs $0; 800 requests costs $200. The $200 is a base, not a prepaid bundle that is owed when the key sits idle.
The first invoice is not $200. FAQ item 14 describes a $140 deposit taken at subscribe time, then deducted from the first cycle's total. The worked example on that page: after one month the bill might be $360.80, and the $140 deposit leaves $220.80 due. That $360.80 figure is the FAQ's illustration, not a second published overage table. Read it as proof that the first cycle can exceed $200 once overage and the deposit mechanic combine.
Billing is monthly from the subscribe timestamp. Downgrade from Pro to Free triggers an immediate prorated charge; the dashboard refreshes that prorated amount every 10 minutes. Failed cards get an email, then a tighter rate limit (429 if that limit is hit), then suspension if the charge still fails within 12 hours.
Refunds are closed on the pricing page: "All sales are final. No refunds for the PRO plan." The billing FAQ only mentions refunds when Listen Notes itself needs to reverse a charge (bugs), via Stripe or PayPal. Cards accepted: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, JCB. PayPal is the non-card path.
Which Listen Notes limits change the product, not just the invoice
Search depth is the first hard product gate. OpenAPI (accessed 5 September 2026) and the pricing grid agree: Free can walk GET /search to 30 results (offset < 30). Pro can walk to 300. Enterprise can walk to 10,000. A podcast app that paginates past result 30 on Free is finished, even if monthly quota remains.
Rate limits are the second gate, and they are not a single RPS number. The Free column on pricing prints 2 requests/second and 20 requests/minute. Pro is labeled "medium." Enterprise is labeled "high." FAQ 17 adds that limits vary by endpoint, that compute-heavy routes are tighter, and that a new account starts lower and is raised over time. The official agent reference at podcastapi.com/llms-full.txt says not to hard-code one global requests-per-second figure. The honest buyer note: Free publishes 2/s and 20/min; Pro and Enterprise do not print a public RPS on the pricing page.
Transcripts are a Pro/Enterprise field with a coverage caveat. GET /episodes/{id} accepts show_transcript=1. The transcript field exists only on Pro and Enterprise. The same contract, plus the Listen Notes transcript tutorial, says less than 1% of episodes actually have a transcript. Pricing copy that says "full transcripts" is plan access, not catalog coverage. Teams that need speech-to-text on arbitrary audio still pull the episode audio URL and run a separate transcriber.
Other Pro-only fields on the same docs pass: RSS URL, producer email, listen_score, global rank, 1400x1400 artwork (Free artwork is the 300x300 thumbnail), batch podcast/episode fetch, and advanced search endpoints. Team seats: up to 3 on Free, 10 on Pro, 100+ on Enterprise.
Caching and logo rules sit in the terms, not the dollar column. Free and Pro may cache on the client. They may store only ids and pub_date values on the server. They must show a "Powered by Listen Notes" mark on at least one screen that renders API data. Enterprise can store full responses on origin servers and drop the logo. Multiple Free accounts to dodge the 300 cap is listed as a suspension reason.
The HTTP surface is REST. Production base URL: https://listen-api.listennotes.com/api/v2. Mock base URL (no key, fake data): https://listen-api-test.listennotes.com/api/v2. Auth header: X-ListenAPI-Key. The 5 September 2026 OpenAPI and the June 2026 agent-reference snapshot both describe 26 operations, including GET /search, GET /best_podcasts, GET /trending_searches, batch POST /podcasts, playlists, and GET /episodes/{id}. Status codes on OpenAPI: 200, 400, 401, 429, and 5XX. Usage headers on 200s: X-ListenAPI-FreeQuota, X-ListenAPI-Usage, X-ListenAPI-NextBillingDate. There is no first-party Cursor mcp.json on the docs, pricing, FAQ, or billing pages fetched this run.
curl -G \
-H "X-ListenAPI-Key: $LISTEN_API_KEY" \
"https://listen-api.listennotes.com/api/v2/search" \
--data-urlencode "q=climate technology" \
--data-urlencode "type=podcast"
That curl is the official install path: a server-side GET with a custom header. Query parameters belong in the fenced example, not as inline flags in prose.
When Trends MCP is the cheaper (or the wrong) buy
Listen Notes wins podcast directory work: full-text search across millions of shows and episodes, metadata hydration, genre charts, playlists, ID resolution from RSS / Apple / Spotify identifiers, and (on Pro) sparse transcripts. Trends MCP does not ship that catalog. Anyone building a podcast app, a guest-booking CRM, or an episode search box still needs Listen Notes or a peer directory API.
Trends MCP wins live ranked boards and agent install. The matching feed is Spotify Top Podcasts on get_top_trends (no keyword). Default limit is 25, max 200. Free boards return the top 10 and pin offset at 0. MCP bills 1 credit per 10 requested rows (max 10 credits per call); REST bills 1 request per call. Only HTTP 2xx counts. That board is documented in the product markdown docs and on the Spotify Top Podcasts API page. It is a chart, not a search index.
Cursor config from the same docs pass (5 September 2026), in ~/.cursor/mcp.json on Mac/Linux:
"trends-mcp": {
"url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
"transport": "http",
"headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
}
That JSON is the durable difference. Listen Notes asks for X-ListenAPI-Key on REST. Trends MCP asks for url + transport: http + Bearer against https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp. Claude.ai Connectors use a separate OAuth host on the www site; do not "fix" that URL to the api host.
Public Trends MCP prices the same day, from the markdown pricing page and the HTML /pricing page:
| Plan | Monthly requests | Monthly price | Yearly as billed on HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 | $0 | n/a |
| Starter | 1,000 | $19 | $16/mo, $192 billed annually |
| Pro | 5,000 | $49 | $39/mo, $468 billed annually |
| Business | 25,000 | $199 | $159/mo, $1,910 billed annually |
Annual billing is advertised as 20% off, with HTML yearly-toggle copy "2 months free." HTML paid cards collect a card at checkout and print "$192/year after day 7" (and the Pro/Business equivalents). The FAQ on the same HTML page says the card is not charged until day 8. Cite both. Do not flatten them.
HTML Free also prints 90 days of history, top 10 trends, and a 24-hour delay. Starter prints 1 year of history and "Every trend, no delay." Pro prints 2+ years, 50 keyword alerts, and top 100 trends per feed. Business prints full history and 250 keyword alerts. pricing.md on 5 September 2026 still lists only request counts and dollar prices; it does not repeat those Free/Starter/Pro depth caps. docs.md still describes get_time_series as about 5 years of weekly points, with no plan split. Buyers who need history depth should read the HTML cards and the markdown docs as two prints, not one.
Source counts are split too. HTML plan cards say 35+ data sources. The HTML FAQ on the same page says every plan includes the same 40+ sources. llms.txt and docs.md list 16 keyword sources (including python) plus 24 named live feeds, including all four by Category boards. data-sources.md lists the same 16 keyword sources and only 20 live feeds; it omits every by Category board. The MCP get_top_trends schema in this run lists 24 feeds. Do not collapse those figures into a single "35+" or "40+" claim.
A 5,000-request Listen Notes Pro month at $200 is four times a 5,000-request Trends MCP Pro month at $49. That arithmetic only matters if the jobs overlap. They barely do. Episode search, transcripts, and RSS hydration stay on Listen Notes. Spotify chart pulls inside Cursor stay on Trends MCP. The podcast trend research roundup is the sibling post for tool shape; this page is the invoice. Cursor setup for the trend side lives on MCP server for Cursor.
FAQ
How much does Listen Notes API cost per month?
Free is $0 for 300 successful requests, then a 429 until the cycle resets. Pro is $0 in a month with zero requests and $200 once at least one HTTP 200 is used, with 5,000 requests included and tiered overage after that. Enterprise is an annual quote with a 35,000-request floor in the billing FAQ. Figures above are from listennotes.com/api/pricing/ and listennotes.com/api/billing-faq/ on 5 September 2026.
Does Listen Notes charge for failed requests?
No. The billing FAQ counts only HTTP 200. HEAD requests, images, audio, and webhooks are outside the meter. A 401 or 429 does not increment Pro usage. Trends MCP uses the same 2xx-only rule on its own quota.
Is the $200 Pro fee owed if the key sits idle?
Not after 18 January 2023. A Pro billing cycle with 0 requests bills $0. One successful call in that cycle turns on the $200 base. The $140 subscribe deposit is separate: it is taken up front and later deducted from the first cycle.
Can Listen Notes data be cached on a backend?
On Free and Pro, only podcast/episode ids and publication-date fields may live on a server. Full JSON caching on the origin is an Enterprise term. Client-side cache is allowed on Free and Pro. A "Powered by Listen Notes" mark is required on those two plans.
Should a Cursor agent use Listen Notes or Trends MCP for podcasts?
Use Listen Notes REST (X-ListenAPI-Key, GET /search) when the agent must find a show, an episode, or a transcript field. Use Trends MCP get_top_trends with type Spotify Top Podcasts when the agent needs the current Spotify chart, pagination limit/offset, or the Cursor JSON above. Official Listen Notes docs did not publish a first-party mcp.json on this fetch.
Sources (all accessed 5 September 2026): Listen API pricing, Listen API billing FAQ, Listen API docs, Listen API general FAQ, OpenAPI markdown, podcastapi.com agent reference. Trends MCP figures come from the same-day HTML /pricing page plus the markdown pricing, docs, data-sources, and llms.txt mirrors.