GNews is a general news search API covering every topic, with a free plan restricted to non-commercial use and delayed by 12 hours. Scoopkit covers AI industry news only, returns deduplicated typed events instead of raw articles, and applies no tier-based delay at all: every plan sees an event the moment it publishes, and its free plan is usable in production. If you are prototyping something you intend to ship, that restriction is the difference that matters most, and it shows up before any feature comparison does.
GNews pricing and limits checked directly against gnews.io on 2026-09-08. Scoopkit figures are its own published tiers.
One clarification worth making up front, because "no tier delay" is not the same as instant: Scoopkit holds a new single-article event for about 2 hours before publishing it, to give duplicate coverage a chance to arrive and be merged into one event (the reasoning is here). That hold applies equally to every plan. GNews' 12-hour delay is different in kind, since it is attached to the free plan specifically and paid plans do not have it.
Facts
| GNews free | GNews Essential | Scoopkit free | Scoopkit Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | €0 | €49.99/mo monthly, or €39.99/mo billed annually (€479.99/yr) | $0 | $49/mo |
| Requests | 100/day | 1,000/day | 100/day | 10,000/day |
| Results per request | 10 articles | 25 articles | 100 events | 100 events |
| Freshness | 12-hour delay on free | No tier delay | No tier delay | No tier delay |
| Archive | 30 days | From 2020 | 45 days | 365 days |
| Commercial use | Not permitted | Permitted | Permitted | Permitted |
| Scope | All topics | All topics | AI industry only | AI industry only |
| Output | Articles | Articles | Deduplicated events | Deduplicated events |
GNews wins clearly on archive depth. History back to 2020 is genuinely deeper than anything Scoopkit offers, and if you need to reconstruct what happened in 2021, GNews can and Scoopkit cannot.
The free plan restriction
GNews states its free plan is "designed for non-commercial projects, development, and testing purposes only" and cannot be used for commercial projects. It also runs 12 hours behind and enables CORS for localhost only.
Those three limits work together, and they are a deliberate product decision rather than an oversight: the free plan is a demo, not a runway. You can build against it and you cannot launch on it.
Scoopkit's free tier takes the opposite position. 100 requests a day, production allowed, no separate license for commercial use, and no delay attached to the plan you are on. The reasoning behind that is the gating principle the whole product runs on, which is to gate on intelligence rather than on latency. Paid tiers get more structure, more volume, and a longer archive. Nobody gets stale data on purpose.
Articles against events
The deeper difference is what a request returns. GNews returns articles matching a query. Ten of them per request on free, twenty five on Essential.
Ask either service about a single real story and the difference is concrete. When Stripe acquired the AI model marketplace OpenRouter, Scoopkit's pipeline merged 9 separate articles into one event, ev_b0a7e82781b0410b, with an article_count of 9. A keyword search returns those 9 articles as 9 results, and on the free plan that is most of one page of results spent on one story. Across Scoopkit's whole archive of 2,671 events, checked 2026-09-08, 17.0% merge two or more articles, at an average of 1.32 articles per event.
This matters most when you are counting rather than reading. Counting articles double counts stories, so any "how many AI acquisitions happened this month" question answered from an article feed is wrong before you start.
The second half is classification. Scoopkit events arrive typed into 10 categories and 57 subcategories, so FUNDING_AND_DEALS.ACQUISITION is a filter rather than a regex over headlines. GNews has topic parameters, but no AI-specific taxonomy, because it is not built for one vertical.
Choose one of these if
Choose GNews if you need broad multi-topic coverage across all industries, if you need history going back to 2020, or if raw articles are actually what your application consumes. Its archive depth is real and Scoopkit has nothing comparable.
Choose Scoopkit if your subject is the AI industry specifically, if you want one row per story rather than one per article, or if you need to ship on a free tier without a commercial-use restriction. Start on the free tier and check the shape of an event before committing.
Choose a search API like Exa or Tavily if what you actually want is general web search or retrieval for a model, rather than a news feed. Those are retrieval tools rather than news products, and neither deduplicates news into events.
FAQ
Is there a free AI news API?
Scoopkit's free tier is 100 requests a day with a 45-day archive, no plan-based delay, and it can be used commercially. GNews has a free tier too, but it is non-commercial only and 12 hours behind, so it does not cover the same use case.
Is a news API legal to use?
Both services return metadata, headlines, summaries, and links to the original source rather than republishing full articles under their own name. Read each provider's terms for your specific use, particularly around storage and redistribution. The practical difference here is that GNews puts an explicit commercial restriction on its free plan and Scoopkit does not.
Which is cheaper?
GNews Essential is €39.99/mo billed annually (€479.99/yr) against Scoopkit Pro at $49/mo, so on the headline number GNews is a little cheaper at the entry paid tier. Scoopkit Pro includes 10 times the daily requests. Cost per request favors Scoopkit and absolute monthly cost favors GNews, which makes volume the question that decides it.
Can GNews filter to AI news?
You can query for AI keywords, and you will get articles containing those terms, including duplicates and false positives from unrelated uses of the word. What you will not get is a typed event with a subcategory, a confidence score, and a merged article count.