NewsAPI pricing in 2026, from $0 to $449 a month

NewsAPI (newsapi.org) bills $0 on the Developer plan and $449 a month on Business, the first production tier. Advanced is $1,749 a month. Annual billing is advertised at 20 percent off; the pricing page on 4 September 2026 did not print billed-annual dollar totals. Developer is capped at 100 requests per day, delays articles 24 hours, and is barred from staging and production, including internal deployments. Business includes 250,000 requests per month with extra requests at $0.0018. Advanced includes 2,000,000 at $0.0009 extra and a 99.95 percent uptime SLA. Enterprise is quote-only. Full article bodies are not included on any public plan; the content field is truncated to 200 characters. Trends MCP does not replace NewsAPI for article search. It is the cheaper path when the job is ranked Google News boards and keyword news growth inside Cursor or Claude.

Which NewsAPI plan is the production floor?

Business at $449 a month is the first plan News API marks for production and published commercial projects. There is no $19 or $49 step between the free Developer key and that floor. Advanced at $1,749 a month is the next public card. Enterprise is a contact path for extra articles, clustering, custom tagging, unlimited requests, and on-premise deployment. Figures below were read from newsapi.org/pricing on 4 September 2026.

The yearly toggle on that page is labeled "Billing yearly (20% discount)". Invoice and ACH or bank transfer are offered for annual subscriptions. The FAQ states that a cancel stops the next charge; the current paid period still runs to its end. Check the live toggle before paying, because billed-annual dollars were not printed next to the monthly $449 and $1,749 figures on this fetch.

What the $0 Developer plan actually permits

The Developer plan is a local prototype key, not a cheap production SKU. The same pricing FAQ that advertises "totally free, start now" also says the plan may be used for development and testing in a development environment only, and cannot be used in a staging or production environment, including internally. CORS is enabled for localhost. Extra requests are not for sale on this tier. There is no uptime SLA. Support is labeled basic.

The daily cap is 100 HTTP calls, not 100 per month. That is easy to miss next to Trends MCP's Free plan, which is 100 successful calls per month. A dashboard that polls /v2/top-headlines every 15 minutes would burn the NewsAPI Developer quota in about a day. The 24-hour article delay is the other hidden cost: a "live headlines" widget built on Developer will be a day behind even while the HTTP call succeeds.

News API still issues Developer keys without a credit card. That is useful for wiring X-Api-Key locally. Shipping the same key to a public host is the upgrade trigger, not a later courtesy warning.

How NewsAPI counts a request, and what comes back

Any single HTTP request to any News API endpoint counts as one request. Query parameters and the number of articles in the JSON do not change the count. That rule is on the pricing FAQ, accessed 4 September 2026. /v2/everything, /v2/top-headlines, and /v2/top-headlines/sources each bill the same way.

Two page-size defaults sit on the official endpoint pages and do not match. /v2/top-headlines sets pageSize default 20, maximum 100. /v2/everything sets pageSize default 100, maximum 100. A client that assumes one default for both routes will either under-fetch headlines or send a redundant parameter on search. page starts at 1 on /v2/everything.

The JSON is a search result, not a reprint of the article. Pricing FAQ: full article content is not available with any plan; each row includes a URL. The endpoint docs still return a content string truncated to 200 characters, where available. Treat that field as a snippet, not a body. sortBy on /v2/everything accepts relevancy, popularity, and publishedAt, default publishedAt. /v2/top-headlines sorts by earliest date published first, which is the opposite of "newest first."

/v2/everything searches "over 150,000" sources and blogs, with q max length 500 characters, and at most 20 source identifiers per call. /v2/top-headlines cannot mix the sources parameter with country or category. Authentication accepts apiKey on the query string, an X-Api-Key header, or an Authorization header with an optional Bearer prefix; News API warns against base64-encoding that header. HTTP 401 covers a missing or wrong key. HTTP 429 and the rateLimited / apiKeyExhausted codes cover throttles and empty quotas. Exceeding the monthly paid quota can auto-bill extra requests or pause until the next cycle; the pricing FAQ says the account is alerted first.

Public docs on this fetch describe HTTP REST only. There is no paste-ready Cursor mcp.json on newsapi.org. A Germany business-headlines example from the official top-headlines page:

GET https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines?country=de&category=business&apiKey=API_KEY

That example is also a docs bug worth pricing around. The country parameter table on the same page lists a single country code as the possible option, while the Germany sample uses a different code. The /v2/top-headlines/sources examples on 4 September 2026 also drop the & before apiKey (category=businessapiKey=API_KEY). Copy-paste from that page will 401 until the query string is fixed.

Where Trends MCP is cheaper for ranked news

NewsAPI wins article search: keyword, domain, language, and date filters across a large publisher set, with a production key that starts at $449 a month. Trends MCP wins ranked news and keyword news demand that an agent can call without assembling a news archive. The Google News live board is get_top_trends with type set to Google News Top News. Keyword history uses source google news, news volume, or news sentiment on get_time_series / get_growth. Details live on the Google News Top News API page.

Trends MCP public SKUs on 4 September 2026, from HTML /pricing plus pricing.md: Free $0 / 100 requests per month; Starter $19 / 1,000; Pro $49 / 5,000; Business $199 / 25,000. Annual billing saves 20 percent. HTML yearly as billed: Starter $16 per month ($192), Pro $39 ($468), Business $159 ($1,910), with a "2 months free" yearly toggle. HTML Free also prints top 10 trends, 12 months of history, and 24-hour delayed data; pricing.md the same day does not state those Free caps. Keyword alerts: Pro 50, Business 250. HTML cards still market 35+ data sources; the FAQ on the same pricing page says 40+ sources. docs.md and llms.txt list 16 keyword sources including python, plus 24 live feed names. data-sources.md lists the same 16 keyword sources and only 20 live feeds, omitting all four by Category boards. The MCP get_top_trends schema lists 24 feeds. Do not flatten those counts.

Request math differs. NewsAPI bills every HTTP call, success or not, at one unit. Trends MCP counts only successful 2xx calls. get_growth is one request per source + keyword even when several windows ride in the same call. get_top_trends on MCP costs 1 credit per 10 requested rows (max 10 credits per call); REST is 1 request per call. Default limit is 25, max 200. Free boards return the top 10 and pin offset at 0. Failed calls are free.

HTML paid plans collect a card at checkout for a 7-day trial. The FAQ says the card is not charged until day 8. Yearly fine print on the Starter card says "$192/year after day 7". Cite both. There are no overage charges; a hit limit returns monthly_limit_reached until the 1st or an upgrade.

A ranked Google News pull, no keyword:

{"mode": "get_top_trends", "type": "Google News Top News", "limit": 10}

Cursor Settings → Tools & MCP → Add a Custom MCP Server, documented on 4 September 2026 at MCP server for Cursor:

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

Two hosts, not interchangeable: Bearer against https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp for Cursor and most clients; OAuth against the www /mcp path for Claude.ai Connectors only. REST is POST https://api.trendsmcp.ai/api. NewsAPI remains the buy when the product is a searchable article index. Trends MCP is the buy when the agent needs a ranked news board and a growth series, not 150,000 article rows.

FAQ

How much does NewsAPI cost in 2026?

Developer is $0. Business is $449 a month for 250,000 requests. Advanced is $1,749 a month for 2,000,000 requests. Enterprise is quote-only. Annual billing is advertised at 20 percent off; billed-annual totals were not printed on newsapi.org/pricing on 4 September 2026. Extra requests on Business are $0.0018 and on Advanced $0.0009.

Can the free NewsAPI plan run in production?

No. The Developer plan is limited to development and testing in a development environment. Staging, production, and internal non-dev use require a paid subscription. CORS is localhost-only. Articles are delayed 24 hours. The cap is 100 requests per day with no extras for sale.

Does NewsAPI return the full article text?

No public plan includes full article bodies. Each result includes a URL. Endpoint docs still expose a content field truncated to 200 characters where available. Scraping the URL is left to the caller, and publisher rules still apply.

Is Trends MCP a NewsAPI alternative?

Only for ranked news and keyword news demand, not for article search. NewsAPI's /v2/everything endpoint is the article index. Trends MCP's Google News Top News feed and google news / news volume / news sentiment sources are the trend layer. Production NewsAPI starts at $449 a month. Trends MCP Starter is $19 a month, with a 100-request Free tier.

What happens when a NewsAPI quota runs out?

The pricing FAQ says the account is alerted before the monthly cap, then can auto-bill extras or pause until the next cycle. Developer has no extras. HTTP 429 and error codes rateLimited and apiKeyExhausted are the machine-readable stops. Trends MCP pauses with monthly_limit_reached and does not sell overage blocks.

Sources: News API pricing (accessed 4 Sep 2026); News API endpoints (accessed 4 Sep 2026); News API authentication (accessed 4 Sep 2026); top headlines and everything (accessed 4 Sep 2026); News API errors (accessed 4 Sep 2026); News API sources (accessed 4 Sep 2026); Trends MCP docs.md and pricing.md (accessed 4 Sep 2026); HTML https://www.trendsmcp.ai/pricing and homepage counters the same day.