A strong developer portfolio showcases real-world skills, and nothing demonstrates practical ability better than projects that consume live APIs. Free APIs let you build impressive, data-driven applications without spending a dime on backend infrastructure. This guide lists 15 of the best free APIs for portfolio projects in 2026, organized by category, with project ideas and code examples to get you started.
Hiring managers and clients want to see that you can work with external data sources, handle asynchronous requests, manage authentication, and parse JSON responses. Portfolio projects that integrate APIs demonstrate these skills directly. They also produce more dynamic, impressive demos than static HTML pages.
Benefits of API-powered portfolio projects:
| API | Category | Free Tier | Auth Required? | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open-Meteo | Weather | Unlimited (non-commercial) | No | Weather dashboards |
| OpenWeatherMap | Weather | 1,000 calls/day | API Key | Map-based weather apps |
| CoinGecko | Cryptocurrency | 30 calls/min | No | Crypto trackers |
| Alpha Vantage | Stock Market | 25 calls/day | API Key | Financial dashboards |
| Hugging Face Inference | AI / ML | 1,000 calls/day | API Key | AI-powered apps |
| DevProToolkit AI | AI / Utilities | Generous free tier | API Key | Text analysis, QR codes, PDFs |
| Unsplash | Images | 50 requests/hour | API Key | Image galleries |
| Pexels | Images / Video | 200 requests/hour | API Key | Media search apps |
| REST Countries | Public Data | Unlimited | No | Country info apps |
| PokeAPI | Fun / Gaming | Unlimited | No | Beginner projects |
| JSONPlaceholder | Mock / Practice | Unlimited | No | Learning REST basics |
| News API | News | 100 calls/day | API Key | News aggregators |
| TMDB | Movies / TV | Unlimited (with key) | API Key | Movie discovery apps |
| GitHub API | Developer Tools | 5,000 calls/hour | OAuth / Token | Dev portfolio dashboards |
| NASA Open APIs | Science / Space | 1,000 calls/hour | API Key | Space-themed projects |
Open-Meteo is the easiest weather API to get started with. No API key, no signup, and unlimited free calls for non-commercial use. It provides 16-day forecasts, historical data back to 1940, and geocoding. Perfect for building a weather dashboard as your first API project.
OpenWeatherMap offers 1,000 free calls per day and includes weather map tiles that integrate seamlessly with Leaflet or Mapbox. Great for building interactive, map-based weather applications that stand out in a portfolio.
CoinGecko provides comprehensive cryptocurrency data including prices, market caps, trading volumes, and historical charts. With no API key required and 30 calls per minute, it is the go-to free API for building crypto portfolio trackers and price alert apps.
Alpha Vantage delivers free stock market data including real-time and historical prices, technical indicators, and fundamental data. The 25 calls/day limit is restrictive but sufficient for portfolio projects that cache data intelligently.
Hugging Face gives you access to thousands of pre-trained AI models for text classification, sentiment analysis, translation, image recognition, and more. The free tier supports 1,000 calls per day, making it perfect for AI-powered portfolio projects.
The DevProToolkit API Hub bundles over 100 developer utility APIs under a single key. This includes AI text analysis, QR code generation, PDF processing, screenshot capture, hash generation, and much more. Instead of juggling multiple API keys from different providers, you get everything in one place.
Recommended DevProToolkit APIs for portfolio projects:
Unsplash provides access to over 3 million high-resolution, royalty-free photos through a clean REST API. At 50 requests per hour on the free tier, it is ideal for building image search apps, random background generators, or mood boards.
Pexels offers both photos and videos with 200 requests per hour. Its more generous rate limit makes it a strong alternative to Unsplash, especially for projects that need video content.
The GitHub REST API is a natural fit for developer portfolios. Build a dashboard that displays your repositories, commit activity, pull request statistics, and contribution graph. With 5,000 authenticated requests per hour, rate limits are rarely an issue.
REST Countries provides detailed information about every country: population, languages, currencies, borders, flags, and more. It requires no API key and has no rate limits, making it perfect for beginner-friendly projects like country search tools or geography quizzes.
PokeAPI is the most popular practice API for beginners. Build a Pokedex app to learn pagination, data fetching, caching, and component rendering. No authentication needed.
TMDB offers a comprehensive movie and TV show database with images, ratings, cast information, and recommendations. Build a Netflix-style movie discovery app to showcase your frontend skills.
NASA provides free APIs for astronomy picture of the day (APOD), Mars rover photos, satellite imagery, and near-earth asteroid data. Space-themed projects are visually striking and excellent conversation starters in interviews.
News API aggregates headlines from over 80,000 sources. Build a personalized news reader with category filtering, search, and bookmarking. The 100 calls/day free tier is enough for portfolio demos.
JSONPlaceholder is a fake REST API for testing and prototyping. It provides users, posts, comments, albums, and todos endpoints that mimic real CRUD operations. Ideal for learning REST fundamentals before connecting to live APIs.
This JavaScript example fetches data from two free APIs simultaneously and combines the results. It demonstrates a pattern you can use in any portfolio project.
// Fetch weather and country data in parallel
async function getDashboardData(city, countryCode) {
const [weatherRes, countryRes] = await Promise.all([
fetch(`https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=40.71&longitude=-74.01¤t_weather=true`),
fetch(`https://restcountries.com/v3.1/alpha/${countryCode}`)
]);
const weather = await weatherRes.json();
const country = (await countryRes.json())[0];
return {
temperature: weather.current_weather.temperature,
windSpeed: weather.current_weather.windspeed,
countryName: country.name.common,
population: country.population.toLocaleString(),
flag: country.flags.svg
};
}
// Usage
getDashboardData("New York", "US")
.then(data => console.log(data))
.catch(err => console.error("API error:", err));
For utility features like QR code generation or PDF processing, you can add the DevProToolkit API as a third data source:
// Generate a QR code using DevProToolkit
async function generateQR(text) {
const response = await fetch("https://api.commandsector.in/v1/qr/generate", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
},
body: JSON.stringify({ text, size: 300 })
});
return response.json();
}
Here are five concrete project ideas that combine multiple APIs and showcase different skills:
DevProToolkit gives you 100+ APIs — QR codes, PDFs, AI text tools, screenshots — all under one API key. Perfect for portfolio projects.
Get Your Free API Key →JSONPlaceholder, PokeAPI, and REST Countries are ideal for beginners because they require no API key, have no rate limits, and return well-structured JSON data. They let you focus on learning HTTP requests and data rendering without worrying about authentication.
Two to three APIs per project is the sweet spot. This shows you can orchestrate multiple data sources, handle different authentication methods, and merge data into a cohesive user experience without over-complicating the project.
Free tiers are perfect for portfolio demos, prototypes, and low-traffic personal projects. For production applications with real users, you should plan for paid tiers that offer higher rate limits, SLAs, and dedicated support. The DevProToolkit API Hub offers scalable plans that grow with your application.
Implement caching (store responses in localStorage or a database), use exponential backoff for retries, and batch requests where possible. Showing rate-limit handling in your portfolio project demonstrates production-ready engineering skills.
It depends on the API. Some (like Open-Meteo) restrict free usage to non-commercial projects. Others (like OpenWeatherMap, TMDB, and CoinGecko) allow commercial use on their free tiers with attribution. Always check the terms of service before launching a commercial product.
QR codes, PDFs, TTS, crypto, AI text tools and more. One API key, all tools.
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