A news API for production without a $449 subscription
You want news articles about a brand, a company or a topic inside a script, a spreadsheet, n8n or an AI agent: headline, link, publisher and publication time. Here is where NewsAPI stands, and what PlainRows offers.
NewsAPI plans and their limits
From newsapi.org/pricing on 2026-10-08:
- Developer (free): 100 requests per day, "Articles have a 24 hour delay", search up to a month old, and it "cannot be used in a staging or production environment".
- Business: $449 per month for 250,000 requests, real-time articles, search up to 5 years old.
- Advanced: $1,749 per month for 2,000,000 requests.
Google News itself has no public API.
What PlainRows charges
No subscription to us. The tool runs on Apify: the free Apify plan is enough to test it, and the Starter plan ($19 per month, with $19 of usage included, apify.com/pricing) removes the free-plan limits.
| Data | Tool | Price (Starter plan) |
|---|---|---|
| Google News results for up to 1,000 queries per run, up to 200 articles per query, in 20 countries and their languages: title, URL, publisher, snippet, publication time, position, Top stories. Filters for past hour, day, week, month or year, sort by date. | Google News Scraper API | $0.0016 per article returned; queries with no result and duplicates are free |
Example: monitoring 10 brand names every day, with about 20 new articles each, is about 6,000 articles a month, about $9.60.
When NewsAPI is the better choice
- You are prototyping and a 24-hour delay is fine: the free Developer plan costs nothing.
- You need an archive of up to 5 years, or several hundred thousand requests a month at a fixed price.
- You need article content or author fields. PlainRows returns what Google News shows: headline, publisher, snippet and time.
When PlainRows is the better choice
- You need current articles in production and your volume is far below what $449 a month buys.
- You want the articles Google News ranks for a query, in a given country and language, with their position and Top stories.
- You run it from n8n, Make, Zapier, Google Sheets or an AI agent (MCP), with a hard cap: every run stops at the maximum cost you set.
Competitor facts checked on 2026-10-08 from the linked pages; prices change, check them before you decide.