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# Introduction
You’ve most likely heard folks speak about APIs so much. Principally, an API permits a software program to ask one other piece of software program for assist. For instance, once we use our climate app, it’d use a real-time API to get the info from a distant server. This little dialog saves you from having to construct the whole lot by yourself. On this article, we’re going to have a look at 5 APIs which can be really enjoyable and surprisingly straightforward to make use of. You’ll get to discover AI fashions, net knowledge, engines like google, mannequin fine-tuning, and artificial knowledge. Every of those APIs opens up alternatives to study, experiment, and construct small tasks with no heavy setup. So, let’s get began.
# 1. OpenRouter
Once I was engaged on my analysis paper and wanted to name a number of giant language fashions, the largest headache for me was to maintain monitor of all of the totally different API keys. I actually wished there was of accessing all of them directly (precisely the issue OpenRouter solves). It’s a unified unified API gateway for big language fashions that provides you entry to over 100 fashions from main suppliers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and lots of open-source options. So, you solely want one API key and one integration, and you may swap between fashions just by altering a parameter. It additionally handles sensible supplier routing, automated fallback if a mannequin is down, and routing based mostly on price, latency, or availability. Responses are available a standardized format (textual content or picture assist), assist streaming by way of SSE, and all SDKs / shoppers appropriate with OpenAI APIs (Python, JS, and so on.) work out-of-the-box with OpenRouter. Pricing is pay-as-you-go with no minimums, beginning at fractions of a cent per token, and there’s a free tier for testing.
# 2. Olostep
I personally consider that two of the largest challenges with utilizing LLMs are getting real-time knowledge to make sure your info is updated and changing it right into a structured format that your mannequin can really use. And Olostep solves each of them. It’s a web-data API that lets you scrape, crawl, and search nearly any publicly accessible web site and get the outcomes immediately within the format you need. You may feed reside search outcomes, information, or different on-line content material instantly into your utility. Olostep additionally takes care of structuring the info. It helps a number of endpoints, e.g.,/scrapes for particular person URLs, /crawls to recursively observe hyperlinks throughout a website, /batches to course of 1000’s of URLs in parallel, and /solutions permitting “ask-the-web” fashion queries the place you get extracted solutions (with sources) relatively than uncooked HTML. The API additionally handles JavaScript-rendered pages, proxies, and anti-bot mechanisms routinely, making it dependable even for advanced web sites. Pricing begins free (500 requests), with paid tiers from USD 9/month (5k requests) to USD 399/month (1M requests), plus credit score packs for flexibility.
# 3. Tinker API
Tinker API a brand new API from Pondering Machines Lab (launched October 2025) that goals to simplify fine-tuning and customized coaching of open-weight giant language fashions by supplying you with full management over the coaching loop i.e forward_backward, optim_step, pattern, save_state and so on. As soon as coaching is finished, you may obtain the adapter/weights and use them exterior Tinker together with your most well-liked inference stack. It helps fashionable base fashions like Llama, Mistral, and GPT variants, with endpoints for fast LoRA/QLORA fine-tunes, multi-agent simulations, and data-centric tweaks reminiscent of artificial augmentation or bias mitigation. It additionally contains sandbox-like interface for prototyping in minutes. Tinker is at present in non-public beta with a free tier for small experiments (e.g., <1B params), and it’s already being utilized by analysis teams at universities like Princeton, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Scaling to pay-per-compute-hour fashions beginning at USD 0.50/hour for mid-tier GPUs.
# 4. SerpApi
SerpApi is a real-time net search API that makes it straightforward to get structured search outcomes from Google and different engines like google. It could possibly fetch natural outcomes, information, photographs, purchasing listings, maps, and knowledge-graph containers, and ship in a clear JSON (or optionally uncooked HTML). The API handles the advanced components for you, together with fixing CAPTCHAs, rendering JavaScript, managing proxies, and mimicking actual consumer conduct, so that you get correct and up-to-date outcomes. You may management many parameters, together with search question, language, location, system kind, search kind, pagination, and output format. This makes it straightforward to fine-tune the info you obtain. Pricing begins with a free tier that provides 250 searches monthly. Paid plans embrace Developer at USD 75 for five,000 searches, Manufacturing at USD 150 for 15,000 searches, and Large Knowledge at USD 275 for 30,000 searches. All plans are month-to-month, with 99.95% uptime for paid choices and customized high-volume plans accessible.
# 5. MOSTLY AI Generator API
MOSTLY AI Generator API helps you create real looking, privacy-safe knowledge out of your actual datasets. You begin by coaching a generator in your tables, CSVs, or databases. The generator learns patterns, correlations, and relationships in your knowledge whereas retaining non-public info secure. After coaching, you may create as many new information as you want utilizing the API or the Python SDK. It really works with many knowledge varieties, together with numbers, classes, textual content, time-series, geolocation, and multi-table datasets. You can too do conditional sampling, rebalance distributions, or fill in lacking values. The platform provides detailed stories so you may see how intently the artificial knowledge matches the unique, together with distributions and correlations. You should use this knowledge for sharing safely throughout groups, testing machine studying fashions, or working experiments the place utilizing actual knowledge is dangerous. It provides you sensible, versatile knowledge you may belief for analytics, AI coaching, or analysis with out exposing delicate info.
# Wrapping Up
These 5 APIs present how a lot you are able to do with out constructing the whole lot from scratch. OpenRouter makes working with a number of LLMs easy with one API key. Olostep provides you reside net knowledge and turns it right into a structured format your fashions can use. Tinker allows you to fine-tune and experiment with LLMs with out sophisticated setups. SerpApi makes real-time search straightforward and dependable, and MOSTLY AI Generator API helps you create real looking, privacy-safe knowledge for testing and experiments. Each is highly effective, but additionally beginner-friendly sufficient to attempt rapidly.
Which APIs do you want essentially the most? Have you ever tried any of those, or do you employ others? Share your favorites within the feedback beneath. I’d like to see what you’re working with 🙂
Kanwal Mehreen is a machine studying engineer and a technical author with a profound ardour for knowledge science and the intersection of AI with medication. She co-authored the e-book “Maximizing Productiveness with ChatGPT”. As a Google Technology Scholar 2022 for APAC, she champions variety and tutorial excellence. She’s additionally acknowledged as a Teradata Variety in Tech Scholar, Mitacs Globalink Analysis Scholar, and Harvard WeCode Scholar. Kanwal is an ardent advocate for change, having based FEMCodes to empower ladies in STEM fields.
