What News API does and who it is for
News API, built by Bonai, aggregates articles across more than 100,000 publishers worldwide and makes them searchable through a straightforward REST interface. Responses are JSON, requests are GET-based, and the documentation exposes clear query parameters — making it accessible to developers who need a news feed without the overhead of building their own crawler.
The target audience is fairly broad: app developers who want to surface relevant stories in a product, data analysts who need historical news for sentiment or trend work, and teams monitoring industry or competitor coverage. With 61 supported topics (ranging from Sports to broader categories) and more than 25 languages, the API covers enough ground to serve both niche and general-purpose applications.
Key endpoints
The API exposes five functional endpoint groups plus a set of info endpoints for discovery.
Search Articles — GET /v2/search/articles
The workhorse endpoint. You pass a query keyword and optional filters like language, date range, and sort order (by date, popularity, or relevance). This is the entry point for any keyword-driven news feed or monitoring use case. Historical data is accessible here, not just live articles.
Trending News — GET /v2/trendings
Retrieves trending articles by topic rather than keyword. You specify a topic (one of 61 categories) and a language. Both live and historical trending data are available, which matters if you're analyzing what was popular during a past event rather than just right now.
Get Article Content — GET /v2/article
Given a source URL, this endpoint fetches the full article content. You can request the response as plaintext, which simplifies downstream text processing. Bonai states that full content is available for over 95% of articles — some will be incomplete due to publisher terms or technical constraints. The Paywall field in the response signals whether the article sits behind a paywall, letting you handle that case in your UI.
Get Random Article — GET /v2/article/random
Filters by language and topic and returns a random article from the index. This is a convenience endpoint most useful for demo apps, content discovery widgets, or testing pipelines.
Search Publishers — GET /v2/search/publishers
Allows searching the publisher index by query, language, or country. Useful for curating a whitelist of trusted sources or understanding what's available before building a search query around specific outlets.
Info endpoints
Three supporting endpoints — /v2/info/topics, /v2/info/languages, and /v2/info/countries — enumerate the supported values for filters. Calling these at startup and caching the results is good practice rather than hardcoding values.
Response fields and what each plan unlocks
One of the more unusual aspects of News API's plan structure is that the free Basic tier includes the most complete field set. Here is how fields map across plans:
| Field | Basic (free) | Pro ($19) | Ultra ($49) | Mega ($149) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| URL | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Excerpt | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Thumbnail | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Language | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Paywall indicator | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Full content | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Content length | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Date | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Authors | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Keywords | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Publisher | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
The Pro plan at $19/month is a stripped-down middle option — it loses excerpt, thumbnail, full content, authors, and keywords compared to the free tier. For most metadata-driven use cases, Pro is actually weaker than Basic, just with a higher request ceiling and rate limit. Ultra at $49/month restores most fields but still omits full article content. Mega at $149/month is the only paid tier that includes full content along with the highest request volume.
If your application needs full article body text, the decision is binary: stay on Basic (1,000 requests/month) or jump to Mega ($149/month). Ultra does not fill that gap.
Pricing breakdown
| Plan | Monthly cost | Requests/month | Rate limit | Overage per request |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 | 1,000 | — | — |
| Pro | $19 | 30,000 | 5/second | $0.0010 |
| Ultra | $49 | 50,000 | 10/second | $0.0010 |
| Mega | $149 | 250,000 | 10/second | $0.0005 |
The free tier is limited to 1,000 requests per month — enough to build a proof of concept or run a low-traffic widget, but not much else. Pro and Ultra share the same overage rate of $0.001 per additional request; Mega halves that to $0.0005, which matters at high volumes. A project consistently hitting 400,000 requests on Mega would pay $149 + (150,000 × $0.0005) = $224 — still cheaper than running two Ultra subscriptions.
For very high volumes or custom requirements, Bonai offers direct negotiation at [email protected].
Practical use cases
- News aggregator or reader app: Search Articles by topic and language to populate a personalized feed. Ultra covers this well and includes thumbnails and excerpts for display.
- Media monitoring: Combine Search Articles with keyword queries to track brand mentions or competitor coverage. Historical access means you can backfill data.
- Content enrichment: Use Get Article Content on URLs you already have — from social media scrapes or RSS feeds — to retrieve clean plaintext bodies for NLP pipelines. Requires Mega for reliable full-text access.
- Research and trend analysis: Trending News across 61 topics with historical support provides a structured signal for sentiment analysis or event detection.
- Publisher discovery: Search Publishers is useful when building an editorial tool where editors select trusted sources before running searches.
Limitations and things to verify before integrating
Latency: The average response time is 1,210 ms. That is acceptable for background jobs or server-side rendering but is borderline for real-time user-facing requests. If you're building a search-as-you-type feature, plan for skeleton loading states.
Content completeness: Full article content is available for more than 95% of articles. The remaining gap is caused by publisher restrictions and paywalls — the Paywall field helps you detect and handle those cases, but you won't get content behind hard paywalls regardless of your plan.
Pro plan field gaps: If you're evaluating plans based on price and request volume, carefully check the feature table. The Pro plan's missing fields (author, keywords, excerpt, thumbnail, content) make it a poor fit for most display or enrichment use cases compared to Basic or Mega.
Rate limits: Basic has no documented rate limit, which is common for free tiers with low monthly caps. Pro is capped at 5 requests per second; Ultra and Mega at 10 per second. For batch processing jobs, account for these limits in your retry and queue logic.
Success rate: At 99%, one in every 100 requests can be expected to fail. Build retry logic with exponential backoff and handle the structured error responses — the API returns a success boolean, an HTTP status code, a message, and a fields array that pinpoints which parameter caused a 400-level error.
Getting started
The API is hosted on RapidAPI (bonai.io links through to the marketplace), so you can sign up, subscribe to the Basic plan, and make your first call without any approval process. Start with the info endpoints — /v2/info/topics, /v2/info/languages, and /v2/info/countries — to understand what filter values are valid, then move to Search Articles with a simple query and language=en. The error responses are well-structured enough that debugging malformed requests is straightforward. Once you have a handle on request volumes and which fields your application actually needs, you can make an informed decision about which paid tier — if any — fits your production requirements.
