If you're looking for a NewsAPI alternative to cover AI industry news specifically, most of the well-known options are horizontal, all-topics news APIs that happen to also return AI stories. Scoopkit is the only one in this list built only for the AI industry, returning deduplicated events instead of raw articles.
Every price and limit below was checked directly against each vendor's pricing page on 2026-08-28, not pulled from an old comparison post. MCP status re-verified 2026-08-30.
Facts
| API | Free tier | Cheapest paid plan | Returns | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsAPI.org | 100 req/day, development only | $449/mo, 250k req/mo | Raw articles | All industries |
| NewsCatcher | Pay-as-you-go, 2-week depth | $50/mo, 6,000 credits | Raw articles + NLP tags | All industries |
| NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry) | 2,000 tokens, one time | $90/mo, token-based | Event clusters + articles | All industries |
| APITube | 100 req/day, 12-hour delay | $29/mo, 10,000 req | Raw articles + MCP server | All industries |
| NewsData.io | 200 credits/day | $199.99/mo, 20,000 credits | Raw articles | All industries |
| World News API | 50 points/day, 1 req/sec | $39/mo, 500 points/day | Raw articles | All industries |
| Perigon | 150 req/mo | $250/mo, 10,000 req/mo | Clustered narratives | All industries |
| Scoopkit | 100 req/day, production allowed | $49/mo, 10,000 req/day | Deduplicated events, typed + MCP server | AI industry only |
Only one free tier here is unrestricted
NewsAPI.org states directly on its pricing page that the free Developer plan "may be used for development and testing in a development environment only, and cannot be used in a staging or production environment." Perigon's free tier caps out at 150 requests a month. NewsAPI.ai's free allocation is 2,000 tokens one time, not recurring.
Scoopkit's free tier is 100 requests a day, recurring, and there's no restriction against using it in a real production integration from day one.
What "AI industry only" actually changes
Every other API on this list is horizontal: it returns news across every topic, and you filter down to AI coverage yourself. That means duplicate coverage of the same story from 3 different outlets shows up as 3 separate articles unless you build your own deduplication layer.
Scoopkit runs that deduplication at ingest, described in detail in how Scoopkit deduplicates AI news headlines, and classifies every event into a fixed taxonomy built around AI industry news specifically, covered in Scoopkit's event taxonomy. If your use case is broader than AI, that narrower scope is a real limitation, not a hidden upside.
Choose one of these if
- NewsAPI.org, if you need broad cross-industry coverage from a well-known brand and can absorb $449/mo or more once you're in production.
- NewsCatcher, if you want deep historical search and entity-level NLP tagging across a large, general source count.
- NewsAPI.ai, if you want a mature, structured event taxonomy that spans every industry, not just AI.
- APITube, if you want a lower-cost general news API with a built-in chat assistant on top of its MCP server.
- NewsData.io or World News API, if you want a straightforward general news API and AI-specific structure doesn't matter to you.
- Perigon, if you want cross-industry narrative clustering and can use a startup-eligible discount.
- Scoopkit, if the news you actually care about is the AI industry, and you want deduplicated, typed events with a free tier (MCP included) you can use in production today. Get a free key.
FAQ
Is there a free news API I can actually use in production?
Check the specific terms before assuming yes. NewsAPI.org's free plan explicitly bans production use. Scoopkit's free tier has no such restriction, just a 100 requests per day limit.
Which of these is built specifically for AI industry news?
Only Scoopkit. The other 7 are horizontal news APIs covering every industry, with AI coverage as one slice of a much larger catalog.
Do any of these deduplicate coverage of the same story?
NewsAPI.ai returns event clusters and Perigon returns clustered narratives, both across all industries. Scoopkit does the same thing scoped to AI industry news, with a taxonomy built around it.