5 FREE APIs for your next programming project

Have you ever been stuck thinking about a project idea but just couldn't get it off the ground? As a programmer, using external tools is a great way to speed up your process of building a project that you want to build. Here are five free APIs that you can use to help you build your next awesome project. You can use these with any programming language, as long as it can do HTTP requests, which I'm pretty sure is like every language, I'm pretty sure. Some of these APIs I mentioned have free tiers and would require some sort of payment after a large use, but that's actually a good problem to have if people are actually using your application. The purpose of these APIs varies, but I wanted to focus it on inspiring you to build an app. I'll provide some ideas you can do with these, or maybe you'll come up with one on your own, which is like up to you. Let's go! Video games is something I have a soft spot in my heart for. If you're an epic gamer like me, check out IGDB's free API. While researching this video, I actually realized that IGDB was acquired by Twitch, which, Twitch, which, is a pretty cool fit. Now, because of this, you do require a Twitch account and 2FA enabled in order to access the API, but what is great with it is that it's by far the most robust database there is. It allows you to build competing products, SSL support, and access its huge catalog of over 200,000 unique games. Awesome! Crowdsourced internet databases is one of my favorite things the internet has to offer. I stay up way too late on Wikipedia. That's why I look tired in all my videos, people. You can stop commenting it now. I just stay up way too late on Wikipedia. There's a huge amount of endpoints to look at like games, companies, platforms, genres, artwork, characters, and much more. It's honestly just a very thorough database of video games. I respect it so much. Here's some fun project ideas you can work on with this API. Create a game like Wordle, where it shows a pixelated version of an artwork, and have the user guess what the artwork is, and make it less blurry the amount of wrong guesses they make. You could go viral with that idea. Create a games catalog website where users can flex their epic gamer vibes by having their games on a shelf that people can view with a link. Scott the Woz style. Include the IGDB in an existing forum you're part of, and whenever a game is referenced, it can give some brief context to those silly non-gamers who can't get good. There are a ton of endpoints and records that you can use to make an awesome project with. So get creative. For JavaScript, Java, and Python users, there are some official wrappers you can use so that you don't have to use a request library. And for PHP, Go, Ruby, and C Sharp users, there are third-party libraries that you can use. Otherwise, you can just get access through HTTP. One thing I would advise is to maybe cache some of the results as the rate limits are a little low. Only four requests per second. So if your app requires for your users to grab a very up-to-date entry, you might need to get a little bit creative. But again, these are good problems to have. Get crackin' gamers! Words API. How much data can you get off of one single measly little word? Well, the answer is shockingly a lot. If your application has some sort of language feature, maybe give the Words API a try. The Words API is an HTTP API that will give you a ton of information on a word that you provide with it. If I enter the word dog, I can get definitions, synonyms, antonyms, examples, rhymes, frequency, regions, categories, entails, has attribute. Like I said, an insane amount of data. I just thought of a project idea. Make an educational app where it has a nice clean user interface like a dictionary where it shows the word in big bold letters and then have all the information underneath in a nice pretty way. Some dictionary websites can be pretty ugly. Make a game like Wordle. This might be a theme by the way. Where a robot voice is the word and you have to guess the spelling of the word. You can even make it like a spelling bee and have clues where it says, can I use that in a sentence, etc. Make a little Chrome extension where when you right click on something, it provides a synonym for the word that is highlighted. The real value when it comes to this API is the data that is behind the word rather than the word itself. If you're interested in just the words, I made a video on an awesome open source project that is just a list of words which you can find below. The free tier is hosted through Rapid API and has 2,500 free requests per day, which if you're making a game above, should be plenty to have fun with. If you're a bookworm, you'll love this. Next API please, Quotes API. So for this, I've chosen a couple APIs because of its broad understanding, but I chose the Quotes API. You'll have a lot of interests in your life, so this will mostly apply to your interests. Whether that is stoicism, inspiration, programming, Kanye West, etc. I will post some links below, but for this video, I'm going to use the Inspiration and Motivational Quote APIs. These APIs are extremely simple because for the most part, you'll just get a small amount of data in each request, like the quote and the author of that quote. No nested data, no nothing. Some APIs like the Zen Quotes API will also provide a character count and an HTML string you can render to the screen, but that's a little scary to do. If you don't want to use an API, you can download a data set of quotes, transfer them to a database, make a RESTful API that you have to do outside of that. It's a bit tough, so maybe just use the API, but that option is still available as well. It's pretty simple. Here are some cool project ideas. I mentioned this in my cool project ideas video I did a while back, but use a random quote generator API of your choice and mix it with an image creation library to make a cool inspiration image generator. Programmatically post that on Twitter and Reddit and just farm that sweet, sweet clout. Make a game where you use the Kanye REST API. What an incredible name! And have the user decide if this quote is something that Kanye said or not. You can even make it really tricky by generating a bunch of fake quotes that Kanye might have said using the OpenAI API. Use the Stoic Quote API to make yourself look like you're emotionally stable on Twitter. Bonus points if you have a picture of a Greek statue as well. This one is awesome too because they host a version of this API, but also has instructions on how you can run this on a serverless function. Self-hosted for the win. Most of the APIs mentioned or similar are free or open source or have a free tier, so look around and see what works for you. There are many things you can do with quotes like games, tweets, or just your own enjoyment. The ones I mentioned above are listed below, but you can find so many ways to implement this into your apps in fun and unique ways. Market Data API If you love finance and think numbers going up and down is a fun personality trait to have, then you should try the Market Data API by Alpaca. Alpaca looks like a mix of Stripe, a payment processor for developers, and Robinhood, an easy way to trade zero commission stocks. The point of this API is to look at market data to see real-time or historical data on a given stock that you provide. They provide a free tier where you can get a more limited amount of data and are rate limited at 200 calls per second. For small projects, this is great. They have an SDK for Python, Go, Node, and C Sharp and also have the WebSocket protocol available so you can get real-time updates without pulling the server. Here are some interesting ideas. Connect a news API and read the sentiment of the news article to see if the negative or positive sentiment make the price go up or down. Make a graph of the all-time performance of a stock and put it through an image generation software to make a cool poster. Well, cool being subjective if that's the stuff that you like hanging up. Since we're gamifying everything here, make a game of a stock ticker and have multiple choice at the bottom asking which stock it is. I'm sure they'll go viral in some niche communities. Being able to include some sort of real-time implementation within your app is a really cool feature. And if you have some cool idea, it just makes it that much cooler. I think this would be a neat API to use in your next project. I love PDF. PDFs are a very strange concept to me. Why? Well, PDFs are both an awesome format because of how many pieces of software support them and they're horrible for how annoying they are to deal with. Apart from a web page, a PDF is like a universally accepted document on all devices, which is why every receipt, invoice, documentation, anything is stored in PDF format. I love PDF loves PDFs so that you don't have to. I just made that up on the spot. I should see if they want to trademark that, but for a price. If you work at an office job, then I don't need to explain to you how annoying all of this is. What's cool with I love PDF is that it provides tools like merging two or more PDF files into a single PDF, splitting pages into multiple files, extracting the text, repairing PDFs, encrypting PDFs, removing the password, and much more. Here are some project ideas. Whenever your email chain is done, have a feature where it automatically goes to the API and generates a PDF of the entire conversation for archiving purposes. If you're building a client website, or require text from a PDF document that was sent to you via a client, use the API to get the text so you don't have to manually copy and paste it. Have you ever received an image in a PDF that was supposed to go on a website? Use this to do the dirty work for you instead of trying to tell your client to send it back directly in the mail. I don't know why that's hard. You can almost use this API exclusively just to fix user errors that come with PDF, which is like almost every PDF by the way. It's honestly just that great. You do require an account with iLovePDF, and they'll give you 250 free files per month, but does get pricey afterwards, so make sure you monitor the amount of PDFs you're generating. There are libraries for .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Node. The API is great, but does require a quick read of the documentation as they have different approach to how you upload, process, and download the files. It is different, but you'll get the hang of it. iLovePDF makes your PDF issues go away. I'm on a roll with these. Make sure you like, comment, and subscribe. Let me know if you want to see more public APIs to recommend. Thanks for watching, coders. I'll see you next time.