Open and Freemium API Access and Rate Limits

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I’m spending some time getting to know the Topsy Labs API today. Topsy Labs offers access to its proprietary metrics, social content, and influence data via a RESTful API. As I was reviewing, their API access and rates limit page caught my eye.

Here is their intro paragraph:

We provide limited, free API access so that you can quickly and easily test the service and confirm the value it will provide to your business. We have three different tiers to match your implementation.

What is interesting, is they not only provide a freemium level they have one better, a free and open tier, provider two introductory API access levels:

  • No API Key - 3,000 queries/day – API calls that do not carry an API key will be limited to 3,000 queries/day.
  • Free API Key - 7,000 queries/day – API calls that carry an API key will increase their limit to 7,000 queries/day.

Then they provide a quick link: Register to get started

What an inviting, frictionless way to getting started with an API. For those wanting more, they also provide information about obtaining a commercial API key:

Once you confirm the value of our API, you can get a commercial license, giving you more volume to accommodate your business needs, exposes other valuable API calls, provides you with technical support, and ensures you are guaranteed specific service level parameters.

The Topsy Labs approach provides an interesting model for some API owners to provide limited and free API access to their APIs, enabling developers to quickly and easily test the service and confirm the value before integrating.