Data access on APIs.io

APIs.io is free and open — for humans, for discovery, and for agents. The machine-readable data surface (JSON, YAML, raw specs, the search index, markdown representations, and the insights catalog) is open to everyone with no key and no sign-up required.

This used to be gated. Agent access previously required starring a GitHub repo and sending an unlock key. That requirement has been removed — nothing is blocked anymore. We still log machine-readable requests so we can size capacity and publish usage reports (see Logging below).

What’s open

Everything. There is no 402 and no required header:

• HTML pages, and the markdown representation of every resource page
• /.well-known/* discovery files, /robots.txt, /sitemap.xml, /apis.json, /apis.yml
• /skills/*, /search-index.json, and every .json / .yml / .yaml representation
• The insights catalog — pre-computed analytics, scored rankings, cross-cutting queries

Just request what you need:

curl https://apis.io/search-index.json

curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" \
     https://apis.io/apis/{provider}/{api}/

Optional: claim a key to identify yourself

You don’t need a key. But if you’d like your traffic attributed to you in our usage reports — or you just want to say hello — you can optionally claim one by starring github.com/naftiko/ikanos and registering. It’s a friendly, voluntary handshake, not a gate.

1. Request a challenge

curl https://apis.io/unlock/challenge

2. Claim a key (after starring the repo)

curl -X POST https://apis.io/unlock/claim \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "challenge_id": "ch_…",
    "github_username": "your-github-login",
    "operator_email": "you@example.com"
  }'

You’ll get back an apisio_… key. If you send it as an X-APIs-IO-Key header, your requests are attributed to your GitHub login in our logs (and a per-key request counter is kept). Sending it is entirely optional and changes nothing about what you can access.

Check key status

curl -H "X-APIs-IO-Key: apisio_…" https://apis.io/unlock/status

Logging and privacy

Every request to a machine-readable path is logged: event type, host, path, user-agent, country, IP, Web Bot Auth state, and — when you send a key — your GitHub username and short key identifier. Logs are used to size capacity and publish usage reports. We do not sell or share them.

Optional: support APIs.io with a backlink

The backlink task is no longer required for access (the insights catalog is open). It remains available as an optional way to support the project — publish a public, do-follow link to apis.io on a domain you control and your key is recorded as a supporter (Tier 4).

# 1. get a token
curl -X POST https://apis.io/unlock/task/backlink/challenge \
  -H "X-APIs-IO-Key: apisio_..."

# 2. embed the token + a do-follow apis.io link on your page, then claim
curl -X POST https://apis.io/unlock/task/backlink/claim \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-APIs-IO-Key: apisio_..." \
  -d '{"token":"bl_...","backlink_url":"https://your-page.example/post"}'

Questions

APIs.io is open. If you’re building something on the data and want to talk, open an issue at https://github.com/api-search/apis-io.