NewsAPI alternatives for article APIs and trend boards

NewsAPI.org is still the easiest REST article search API to wire: three endpoints, a free Developer key, and a documented 150,000-source /v2/everything index. Production is the problem. The first commercial SKU is Business at $449 per month for 250,000 requests, and no plan returns full article bodies. GNews undercuts that jump in euros and prints full content on paid SKUs. Mediastack's first paid card is $24.99 per month for 10,000 calls. NewsData.io's Basic plan is $199.99 per month, Free allows commercial use, and an official uvx MCP exists. Trends MCP does not retrieve articles. It wins when the agent needs a live Google News board plus news volume and news sentiment as remote HTTP tools.

Which NewsAPI alternative matches the actual job?

Pick the replacement by output type first, then by price. NewsAPI, GNews, Mediastack, and NewsData.io all return article records (title, URL, snippet, timestamps). Trends MCP returns ranked boards and keyword series. Crowning any of these "best overall" hides that split.

NewsAPI still owns the "drop in a GET and search 150,000 sources" story. GNews is the closest shape: search plus top headlines, Google News ranking on the headlines path, 80,000 sources. Mediastack is a single news endpoint on APILayer, 7,500+ sources, 50+ countries, 13 languages. NewsData.io is the widest article product in this set: latest, archive, crypto, market, sources, counts, and a WebSocket, with llms.txt on 11 Sep 2026 claiming 99,000+ sources across 200+ countries and 89+ languages. Trends MCP sits in a different column. The Google News Top News API is a ranked live board, not a searchable article archive.

How much does a production news API cost after the free tier?

NewsAPI's free Developer plan is $0 with 100 requests per day, a 24-hour article delay, search up to a month old, and CORS limited to localhost. The pricing FAQ states that Developer cannot run in staging or production, including internal deployments. Business is $449 per month for 250,000 requests, real-time delivery, five-year search, CORS on all origins, extra requests at $0.0018, and no uptime SLA. Advanced is $1,749 per month for 2,000,000 requests, extra requests at $0.0009, and a 99.95% uptime SLA. Enterprise is quote-only. A yearly toggle advertises a 20% discount; the page does not print billed-annual dollar totals next to $449 or $1,749. One HTTP call equals one request, regardless of parameters or result count. Full bodies are unavailable on every SKU; the content field stays truncated to 200 characters where present. A longer SKU walkthrough lives on the NewsAPI pricing post.

GNews prices in euros. Free is €0 for development and testing: 100 requests per day, up to 10 articles per request, a 12-hour delay, 30 days of history, localhost CORS. The FAQ forbids commercial use on Free. Essential is €49.99 per month, or €39.99 per month billed annually at €479.99, with 1,000 requests per day, up to 25 articles, real-time availability, history from 2020, all-origin CORS, and full content. Business is €99.99 per month, or €79.99 / €959.99 yearly, at 5,000 requests per day and 50 articles. Enterprise is €249.99 per month, or €199.99 / €2,399.99 yearly, at 25,000 requests per day and 100 articles. Hitting the daily cap returns HTTP 403; the counter resets at 00:00 UTC. Paid features include a 10-day trial.

Mediastack's Free card is $0 per month: 100 calls per month, delayed data, all 13 languages, no support, non-commercial use. The same card lists HTTPS encryption. Standard is $24.99 per month or $22.99 billed yearly, 10,000 calls, overage printed as +0.009996 each, live data, commercial use, historical data. Professional is $99.99 or $87.99 yearly, 50,000 calls, +0.0079992 each. Business is $249.99 or $212.99 yearly, 250,000 calls, +0.00399984 each. Enterprise is custom. Annual billing is described as up to 15% lower than monthly. The FAQ on that same page still tells buyers to pick the "Basic or Professional Plan" for live and historical data, while the grid labels the first paid SKU Standard. Treat Standard as the live name.

NewsData.io numbers below come from a live GET https://newsdata.io/web/v1/pricing payload on 11 Sep 2026. Free is $0 with 200 credits per day and 10 articles per credit. Latest, crypto, and market endpoints are on. Archive, counts, full content, images, timeframe, and real-time availability are off. Articles are delayed 12 hours. Query length is capped at 100 characters. The first-party pricing blog (updated 13 Aug 2026) states Free may be used for commercial purposes. Basic is $199.99 per month or $1,919.99 per year, 20,000 credits per month, 50 articles per credit, 6 months of history, full content, AI summary, and credit add-ons at $0.006. Professional is $349.99 or $3,359.99 per year, 50,000 credits, 2 years of history, AI tags, and sentiment analysis. Corporate is $1,299.99 or $9,989.99 per year, 1,000,000 credits, 10 years of history, plus AI region. OpenAPI 3.1 on the same day meters /latest, /news, /crypto, /market, and /sources at 1 credit; /archive at 5 credits; count endpoints at 50 credits. WebSocket management calls are free; each delivered stream article costs 1 credit per connected device. The 13 Aug 2026 blog still lists sentiment analysis on Basic. The live JSON sets sentiment_analysis false on Free and Basic, true from Professional. Quote the JSON for current gating.

Trends MCP HTML pricing on 11 Sep 2026: Free $0 for 100 requests per month, 90 days of history, top 10 trends, 24-hour board delay. Starter $19 per month (yearly $16 / $192 billed annually), 1 year of history, top 25, 10 keyword alerts, 1,000 requests. Pro $49 (yearly $39 / $468), 2+ years, top 100 per feed, 50 alerts, 5,000 requests. Business $199 (yearly $159 / $1,910), full archive, 250 alerts, 25,000 requests. Annual billing saves 20%; the yearly toggle copy says 2 months free. Paid plans collect a card for a 7-day trial. pricing.md and docs.md meter MCP get_top_trends at 1 credit per 10 requested rows (max 10 credits per call) and REST get_top_trends at 1 request per call. The HTML FAQ on /pricing still says one successful API or MCP call equals one request. Cite both. Default get_top_trends limit is 25, max 200. Free boards stay at top 10 with offset pinned at 0.

Do not flatten Trends MCP's source count. HTML plan cards say 35+ data sources. The same page's FAQ says 40+ sources. The homepage hero still says 35+ platforms, get_top_trends marketing says 21 platforms, and a homepage FAQ says 40+. docs.md and llms.txt list 16 keyword sources (including python) plus 24 live feeds. data-sources.md lists those 16 keyword sources but only 20 live feeds and omits all four by Category boards. The MCP get_top_trends schema lists 24 feeds. docs.md still describes keyword history as about 5 years weekly with no plan split, which conflicts with the HTML Free 90-day / Starter 1-year / Pro 2+ year / Business full-archive caps.

Which alternatives expose news to Cursor without a custom wrapper?

NewsAPI public docs on 11 Sep 2026 are HTTP REST only. Auth is apiKey query, X-Api-Key header, or Authorization (Bearer optional, not base64). There is no paste-ready Cursor mcp.json. GNews is the same shape: GET https://gnews.io/api/v4/{endpoint} with apikey. Mediastack is GET https://api.mediastack.com/news with access_key. If the buying criterion is "the agent can call news tools," those three need a wrapper.

NewsData.io ships an official MCP. GitHub newsdataapi/newsdata.io-mcp and PyPI newsdata-mcp 0.3.2 (fetched 11 Sep 2026) launch over stdio:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsdata-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["newsdata-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "NEWSDATA_API_KEY": "YOUR_NEWSDATA_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

That block has no url and no transport. Cursor starts a local process. Tools map to article endpoints: get_latest_news (/api/1/latest, last 48 hours), get_archive_news, get_crypto_news, get_market_news, get_news_sources, plus count tools. README notes Free results are delayed relative to paid, and result size is commonly 10 on Free and up to 50 on paid.

Trends MCP is the opposite dialect: a remote HTTP server, API key in a header, no local binary.

"trends-mcp": {
  "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
  "transport": "http",
  "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
}

docs.md is explicit that this host is not interchangeable with the Claude.ai OAuth connector on www /mcp. Windsurf uses serverUrl instead of Cursor's url + transport. VS Code uses "type": "http". The news-related tools are get_top_trends with type "Google News Top News", plus get_time_series / get_growth on sources google news, news volume, and news sentiment. News volume is a mention series, not a list of URLs.

A Cursor workspace can run both configs at once. That is the honest "alternative" for an agent stack: NewsData.io (or NewsAPI REST) for article rows, Trends MCP for whether the story is actually moving.

What does NewsAPI still win on article search?

The /v2/everything contract is still the cleanest generic search in this set. Query q supports quoted phrases, + / -, and AND / OR / NOT, max 500 characters. searchIn can pin title, description, or content. sources accepts at most 20 identifiers. domains and excludeDomains filter by site. sortBy is relevancy, popularity, or publishedAt (default publishedAt). pageSize defaults to 100 and maxes at 100. /v2/top-headlines is a different pager: pageSize default 20, max 100, sorted by earliest date published first, and sources cannot mix with country or category. Categories on that endpoint are business, entertainment, general, health, science, sports, and technology.

GNews does not yet support source filtering; the pricing FAQ says it is on the roadmap. That matters if the current NewsAPI workflow is a fixed allow-list of publishers. GNews headlines are ranked from Google News across 9 categories, which is closer to a board than NewsAPI's earliest-published sort.

NewsData.io's filter rules are stricter in another direction. OpenAPI says use at most one of q, qInTitle, qInMeta; at most one of domain, domainurl, excludedomain; and that id and url must be used alone. Archive exists, but it costs 5 credits per call and starts on Basic. Count endpoints cost 50 credits, so a "how many articles mentioned X" dashboard is not a cheap NewsAPI totalResults clone.

Mediastack remains the inexpensive live-headline pipe. 100 calls per month on Free is a demo, not a product. Standard at $24.99 for 10,000 calls undercuts NewsAPI Business on list price, at 7,500+ sources instead of 150,000.

None of those vendors return a cross-platform trend index. If the ticket is "is this headline a trend or a one-off," article search is the wrong object.

When should Trends MCP replace NewsAPI at all?

Replace NewsAPI with Trends MCP only when the consumer is an agent or notebook that needs ranked news plus other surfaces, not when the consumer renders a story feed. get_top_trends with type "Google News Top News" returns the current Google News leaders. Pair it with news volume and news sentiment on the same keyword to see whether coverage is expanding and in which direction. Add Google Search, Reddit Hot Posts, or X (Twitter) Trending in separate calls when the question is cross-platform, not "give me 100 TechCrunch URLs."

Keep NewsAPI, GNews, Mediastack, or NewsData.io when the application must store url, title, author, and publishedAt for each article. Trends MCP will not grow a content field. The $19 Starter SKU is cheaper than every production article API in the table because it is a different product.

A split stack is the usual outcome. NewsData.io Free (commercial, 200 credits/day, 12-hour delay) or GNews Essential (€49.99, paid full text) covers the feed. Trends MCP Starter covers the board and the volume series. NewsAPI Business stays rational when the team already standardized on /v2/everything and does not want to rewrite query syntax.

FAQ

Is there a cheaper production alternative to NewsAPI Business at $449 per month?

Yes. On 11 Sep 2026, Mediastack Standard is $24.99 per month for 10,000 calls, GNews Essential is €49.99 per month for 1,000 requests per day, NewsData.io Basic is $199.99 per month for 20,000 credits, and Trends MCP Starter is $19 per month for 1,000 trend requests. Those SKUs are not equivalent. Only the first three return articles. Trends MCP returns boards and series. Recheck each vendor's current pricing page before a contract, especially NewsData.io, whose HTML pricing grid is hydrated from /web/v1/pricing.

Does any NewsAPI alternative include full article text?

GNews lists full content on Essential, Business, and Enterprise. NewsData.io's live pricing JSON enables full_content from Basic upward and disables it on Free. NewsAPI's pricing FAQ states full article content is not available with any plan; the docs keep content truncated to 200 characters. Mediastack's public pricing cards do not print a full-body flag; check that vendor's current docs if bodies are required. Trends MCP has no article body field.

Can NewsAPI run in production on the free Developer plan?

No. The NewsAPI pricing page limits Developer to development and testing. Staging, production, and internal deployments require a paid subscription. GNews Free is also barred from commercial projects. Mediastack Free is labeled non-commercial. NewsData.io's 13 Aug 2026 pricing blog says Free can be used for commercial purposes, with a 12-hour delay. Trends MCP Free is 100 requests per month with a 24-hour board delay and no credit card.

Which alternative has an official MCP server for Cursor?

NewsData.io and Trends MCP. NewsData.io's server is a local uvx newsdata-mcp process with NEWSDATA_API_KEY in env (PyPI 0.3.2 on 11 Sep 2026). Trends MCP is remote HTTP: url https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp, transport "http", Bearer header. NewsAPI, GNews, and Mediastack public docs on this date are REST only.

Should Trends MCP be the default NewsAPI alternative?

No. Use it when the job is live news boards and keyword news series inside Claude, Cursor, or another MCP client. Use NewsAPI, GNews, Mediastack, or NewsData.io when the job is article retrieval. Mixing one article API with Trends MCP is the usual architecture, not a single-vendor swap.

Sources (accessed 11 Sep 2026): NewsAPI pricing, NewsAPI everything docs, NewsAPI top-headlines docs, GNews pricing, GNews docs, Mediastack pricing, NewsData.io live pricing JSON, NewsData.io pricing blog, NewsData.io OpenAPI, NewsData.io llms.txt, newsdata-mcp GitHub README, newsdata-mcp PyPI, Trends MCP /pricing HTML, pricing.md, docs.md, data-sources.md, and llms.txt.