Observed Signal · Jul 16, 2026 · Technical Report · Source: DEV Community · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
Audit finds ~20% of popular public APIs broken
A developer audit monitored 99 free public APIs with hourly HTTP checks and found widespread degradation across large community-maintained API lists. The author ran checks on Cloudflare's free tier (Workers + D1), produced daily JSON snapshots and a static site (freeapi.watch) with 30-day uptime metrics and a graveyard of dead APIs. From the sample data the author estimates roughly 15–25% of entries on large community API lists are degraded (dead, paid, moved, or heavily rate-limited). The post lists several prominently discoverable APIs that are dead or paywalled as of mid-2026 and recommends discovery, verification, and monitoring before integrating public APIs.
Practical technical audit relevant to observability and API reliability; useful to engineers and infrastructure teams but not industry-shifting for AdTech broadly.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Yassine Adissa published the audit on DEV Community and originally at freeapi.watch on 2026-07-16.
- The monitoring covered 99 free public APIs with hourly HTTP pings over several months.
- The author estimates 15–25% of entries on large community API lists are degraded (dead, paid, moved endpoints, or severely rate-limited).
- Prominently listed APIs that were dead or paywalled in 2026 include Dark Sky (acquired by Apple), Twitter v1.1 free (paywalled July 2023), Reddit free API (effectively killed June 2023), Yahoo Finance v7, MetaWeather, and Weather Underground (IBM).
- The monitoring system ran on Cloudflare's free tier using Cloudflare Workers and D1, exposed a public JSON snapshot, and rebuilt a static site daily via Astro.
Connected Companies & Entities
11 Entities mapped“The public-apis/public-apis repo (350k+ stars) is the canonical "find a free API" resource....”
“Dark Sky | Killed Dec 2022 (Apple acquisition)...”
“Reddit free API | Effectively killed June 2023...”
“Yahoo Finance v7 | Dead since 2017, unofficial wrappers blocked...”
“My setup (runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier, $0/month): A Worker on two cron schedules pings each API's documented health endpoint hou...”
“Weather Underground | Free tier sunset 2019 (IBM)...”
“Powered by Algolia (page header / site sponsorship content)...”
“Posted on Jul 16 • Originally published at freeapi.watch; article hosted on DEV Community....”
“Article references Anthropic's Claude Code in promoted related content on the page....”
“Google AI is the official AI Model and Platform Partner of DEV (page sponsor content)....”
“Neon is the official database partner of DEV (page sponsor content)....”
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
Related Market Signals & Shifts
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