MDBList API: Movies & TV Ratings from IMDb, TMDb, and More

What MDBList does and who it is for

Building an app that needs entertainment ratings typically means juggling several provider APIs, handling their individual authentication schemes, and merging inconsistent schemas yourself. MDBList removes that friction by aggregating ratings and metadata from IMDb, Trakt, TMDb, Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic Metascore, Roger Ebert, and others into one JSON response per title.

The API is a strong fit for developers working on media tracking apps, recommendation engines, personal watchlist tools, Plex/Jellyfin/Emby plugins, or any project that benefits from showing a richer picture of audience and critic opinion than a single rating source provides. Because it covers both movies and TV shows and returns watch-provider information alongside ratings, it can also serve as a lightweight content-discovery backend.

Endpoint walkthrough

All five endpoints share the same HTTP method (GET) and collectively cover the main ways a developer might identify a title:

Search by title

The title search endpoint accepts an optional year and an optional media-type filter (movie vs. TV show), which meaningfully reduces ambiguity for common titles. This is your entry point when the user supplies free-text input — a search box in your UI, for example.

ID-based lookups

Four dedicated endpoints let you retrieve data by a specific identifier:

• IMDb ID — the most universally portable identifier in the entertainment space; returns data for movies or TV shows.
• TMDb ID — useful when you are already integrating with The Movie Database and want to enrich its data with aggregated ratings.
• Trakt ID — convenient for apps built around Trakt's scrobbling ecosystem.
• TVDB ID — scoped to TV shows only, covering the identifier used widely in Kodi and similar media-center ecosystems.

Having four distinct ID-based routes means MDBList can slot naturally into almost any existing media pipeline without requiring an ID-translation step. If your database already stores IMDb IDs from one source and TMDb IDs from another, you can hit the appropriate endpoint directly.

All responses come back as JSON, and the database is described as constantly updated, which matters for attributes like watch-provider availability that change frequently.

Pricing breakdown

MDBList uses a freemium model with four tiers. The practical differences come down to daily request budget and per-second rate limit.

The BASIC tier's 100 daily requests at 1 req/sec is primarily useful for personal experiments or low-traffic prototypes — a hundred lookups a day is exhausted quickly in any production scenario. It does give you enough headroom to validate the response shape and integration logic before committing.

PRO at $2/month is a sensible step up for small apps or hobbyist projects with a modest user base. Ten thousand requests per day translates to roughly 6-7 requests per minute sustained around the clock, which is reasonable for a side project with hundreds of active users.

ULTRA is the recommended tier and the pricing makes the reasoning clear: for a single extra dollar over PRO you get 10× the daily volume, plus an overage option ($0.0050 per additional request) that acts as a safety valve against unexpected traffic spikes. This makes it attractive for production apps where traffic is somewhat predictable but occasional bursts occur.

MEGA at $5/month targets higher-volume applications. Its overage rate ($0.0010 per request) is five times cheaper than ULTRA's, so if you routinely exceed 100,000 daily requests, MEGA's ceiling and lower overage cost are both advantageous. At 250,000 daily requests, that is roughly 2.9 requests per second sustained continuously — well within the 5 req/sec rate limit.

Note that the 5 req/sec ceiling applies identically to PRO, ULTRA, and MEGA. If your workload involves infrequent but large batches — bulk-enriching a media library overnight, for example — the rate limit is the more relevant constraint than the daily quota.

Practical use cases

Media center plugins: Projects like Plex agents, Kodi scrapers, or Jellyfin plugins regularly need to display multi-source ratings. MDBList's support for IMDb and TVDB IDs (which media centers already store) makes the lookup straightforward, and 100,000+ daily requests on ULTRA covers even large shared libraries.

Watchlist and tracking apps: Users of tracking services want to see at a glance how a title scores across critics (Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert, Metacritic) and audiences (IMDb, Letterboxd, Trakt). A single MDBList call returns all of this, replacing what would otherwise require five or more separate API integrations.

Recommendation engines: Watch-provider data returned alongside ratings allows you to filter recommendations not just by quality signal but by what is actually streamable for a given user, without a separate API call to a streaming-availability service.

Content curation: Newsletters, bots, or dashboards that surface highly rated new releases can use the title-search endpoint with year filtering to identify recent content and rank it by aggregated score.

Limitations and things to check before integrating

• BASIC rate limit: One request per second is restrictive if you intend to do any kind of batch processing. Even PRO's 5 req/sec may require careful queuing for bulk operations.
• No documented response schema here: The fact sheet does not enumerate every response field. Before committing to the integration, call the API manually to verify that the specific rating sources and metadata fields you need (keywords, watch providers, etc.) are present and consistently populated.
• Daily resets: The request quotas are daily, so understanding when the counter resets relative to your timezone matters for apps with concentrated usage patterns (e.g., prime-time evening traffic).
• Single-developer origin: The provider explicitly invites feature requests, which signals an actively maintained but smaller-scale operation. Factor that into your reliability expectations for a production dependency.

Getting started

MDBList is listed as having 4,353 marketplace subscribers and a popularity score of 9.9 out of 10, suggesting a healthy and active community. The API's 100% success rate and 132 ms average latency indicate a stable service worth evaluating seriously.

The most practical onboarding path is to sign up for the free BASIC plan, use the title-search endpoint to fetch a handful of titles you know well, and inspect the JSON response to confirm the rating sources and metadata fields suit your use case. If they do, ULTRA at $3/month gives you enough headroom for most small-to-medium production apps with overage protection included.