"It's free!" might be the most expensive phrase in software development.
You find a free API that does exactly what you need. You integrate it over a weekend. It works. Ship it.
Six months later, you're explaining to your boss why the feature is broken and nobody at the API provider is answering emails.
Here's what that free API actually cost you.
The Vanishing Act
Free APIs disappear. Not sometimes — regularly.
The maintainer gets a job and stops updating it. The startup behind it runs out of runway. The hobbyist project gets deprecated. Google kills another product.
When a paid service shuts down, they usually give notice. They have contractual obligations. They have customers who pay money and will be upset.
When a free service shuts down? You might get a tweet. Maybe.
I've seen production systems break because a free API endpoint started returning 404 one Tuesday morning. No announcement. No migration path. Just gone.
The cost: emergency weekend work to find an alternative, test it, deploy it, and hope nothing else breaks. That's not free.
The Rate Limit Surprise
Free tiers have rate limits. Obviously.
What's less obvious is how those limits behave under real-world conditions.
Your testing during development uses maybe 50 requests. Everything works great. You launch. Users arrive. Suddenly you're hitting rate limits at 10am on a Monday when your traffic spikes.
The free tier that seemed generous during development is now actively breaking your application during peak hours.
Some providers throttle silently — they slow down your requests instead of rejecting them. Your app doesn't crash, it just gets mysteriously slow. Users complain. You check your servers. Everything looks fine.
Days later, you discover the API was adding 2-3 seconds of latency because you exceeded some undocumented soft limit.
The cost: user complaints, debugging time, and the reputation hit of being "the slow app."
The Support Black Hole
Paid customers get support. Free users get a FAQ.
That's fair — nobody expects enterprise support for free. But consider what happens when something goes wrong.
You hit a bug in the API. It's not your code; you've verified that. The API is returning malformed data for certain inputs. You need this fixed.
Your options:
- Post on a community forum and hope someone answers
- Open a GitHub issue and wait weeks or months
- Tweet at the company and hope they're paying attention
- Work around the bug yourself
With a paid service, you open a ticket. Someone responds. The bug gets prioritized. There's accountability.
With a free service, you're shouting into the void.
The cost: your time. Hours spent working around issues that shouldn't be your problem.
The Data Quality Gamble
Free APIs often have... relaxed quality standards.
The data might be outdated. Exchange rates from last week. IP geolocation data that hasn't been updated in months. Business information that's three acquisitions behind.
Free services can't afford the infrastructure to keep data fresh. They're running on donated hosting or a side project budget. Updates happen when someone gets around to it.
You build features assuming the data is accurate. Users trust what your app tells them. Then someone notices that the "current" stock price is actually from Tuesday.
The cost: user trust. The hardest thing to rebuild.
The Integration Tax
Ever notice how free APIs often have... unique designs?
Inconsistent response formats. Authentication that's different from everything else you use. Documentation that assumes you'll figure it out. Error messages that say "something went wrong."
Professional API providers invest in developer experience because their business depends on it. Free APIs are built by people solving their own problem, shared as an afterthought.
Every quirky design decision is time you spend adapting. Custom error handling for this one API. A wrapper layer to normalize responses. Extra code to handle the edge cases that would be handled at the API level by a mature provider.
The cost: integration complexity that compounds over time.
The Scaling Wall
Free tiers aren't designed for success.
They're designed to let you try the API. To evaluate it. To build a proof of concept. They're explicitly not designed for production workloads.
So what happens when your app takes off? When you go from 1,000 requests a day to 100,000?
Option A: Upgrade to paid. But the free tier was from a hobbyist project. There is no paid tier.
Option B: Find a different API. Rewrite your integration. Test everything. Deploy. Hope the new API behaves the same way.
Option C: Beg the maintainer for higher limits. Good luck.
You've built your application on a foundation that explicitly doesn't scale with you. The more successful you are, the bigger your problem.
The cost: architectural decisions made under pressure, usually poorly.
The Compliance Gap
Free APIs rarely come with compliance guarantees.
SOC 2? GDPR? HIPAA? PCI-DSS?
"We're a free service, we don't have those."
Fair enough. But your compliance requirements don't care whether you paid for the service or not. If you're processing data through an API that doesn't meet your compliance obligations, that's your problem.
Enterprise sales fall through because you can't prove your supply chain is compliant. Audits get complicated because there's no data processing agreement with a free API provider who's "just some guy."
The cost: lost deals, audit headaches, potential liability.
When Free Actually Makes Sense
Free APIs aren't always a trap. They make sense when:
You're learning. Experimenting with a new technology? Prototyping? Free is perfect. The cost of failure is low.
It's actually backed by a business. A free tier from an established company is different from a free API from a solo developer. The company has incentives to keep things working.
You have a fallback. If the API disappears tomorrow, can you switch to something else quickly? If yes, the risk is manageable.
The data doesn't matter much. Random joke APIs, placeholder content, non-critical features. If it breaks, nobody's business is affected.
The Math That Changes Everything
Here's the calculation most developers skip:
Your hourly rate × hours spent dealing with free API problems > cost of paid API
If you're worth $75/hour and you spend 10 hours over a year dealing with rate limits, outages, workarounds, and migrations for a free API, that's $750.
A paid API that costs $30/month would have been $360 for the year. And you'd have those 10 hours back.
Free is only free if your time is worthless.
What To Look For Instead
If you need an API for production use:
Transparent pricing. Know what it costs and what you get. Hidden limits are red flags.
Uptime SLAs. If they won't commit to staying online, they probably won't.
Responsive support. Test it before you need it. Send a question. See how long it takes to get an answer.
Consistent design. Professional response formats, clear error messages, good documentation.
Room to grow. Pricing tiers that scale with your usage. You want your success to be their success.
Business model that makes sense. How do they make money? If you can't figure it out, you might be the product.
The next time you see "Free API!" and feel that rush of excitement, pause.
Ask what it will cost when things go wrong. Because with APIs, they eventually do.
Choose services where the provider is incentivized to keep you happy. That usually means paying for value.
Your weekend self will thank you.
Ready for APIs that won't disappear? Browse the APIVerve catalog — transparent pricing, enterprise reliability, one API key.
Originally published at APIVerve Blog
Top comments (0)