5 Fun APIs for Absolute Beginners - KDnuggets

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5 Fun APIs for Absolute Beginners
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Introduction

You’ve probably heard people talk about APIs a lot. Basically, an API allows a software to ask another piece of software for help. For example, when we use our weather app, it might use a real-time API to get the data from a remote server. This little conversation saves you from having to build everything on your own. In this article, we’re going to look at five APIs that are actually fun and surprisingly easy to use. You will get to explore AI models, web data, search engines, model fine-tuning, and synthetic data. Each of these APIs opens up opportunities to learn, experiment, and build small projects without a heavy setup. So, let’s get started.

1. OpenRouter

When I was working on my research paper and needed to call multiple large language models, the biggest headache for me was to keep track of all the different API keys. I really wished there was of accessing all of them at once (exactly the problem OpenRouter solves). It’s a unified unified API gateway for large language models that gives you access to over 100 models from major providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, Cohere, and many open-source alternatives. So, you only need one API key and one integration, and you can switch between models simply by changing a parameter. It also handles smart provider routing, automatic fallback if a model is down, and routing based on cost, latency, or availability. Responses come in a standardized format (text or image support), support streaming via SSE, and all SDKs / clients compatible with OpenAI APIs (Python, JS, etc.) work out-of-the-box with OpenRouter. Pricing is pay-as-you-go with no minimums, starting at fractions of a cent per token, and there is a free tier for testing.

2. Olostep

I personally believe that two of the biggest challenges with using LLMs are getting real-time data to ensure your information is up to date and converting it into a structured format that your model can actually use. And Olostep solves both of them. It is a web-data API that allows you to scrape, crawl, and search almost any publicly available website and get the results instantly in the format you want. You can feed live search results, news, or other online content directly into your application. Olostep also takes care of structuring the data. It supports multiple endpoints, e.g.,/scrapes for individual URLs, /crawls to recursively follow links across a site, /batches to process thousands of URLs in parallel, and /answers allowing “ask-the-web” style queries where you get extracted answers (with sources) rather than raw HTML. The API also handles JavaScript-rendered pages, proxies, and anti-bot mechanisms automatically, making it reliable even for complex websites. Pricing starts free (500 requests), with paid tiers from USD 9/month (5k requests) to USD 399/month (1M requests), plus credit packs for flexibility.

3. Tinker API

Tinker API a new API from Thinking Machines Lab (launched October 2025) that aims to simplify fine-tuning and custom training of open-weight large language models by giving you full control over the training loop i.e forward_backward, optim_step, sample, save_state etc. Once training is done, you can download the adapter/weights and use them outside Tinker with your preferred inference stack. It supports popular base models like Llama, Mistral, and GPT variants, with endpoints for quick LoRA/QLORA fine-tunes, multi-agent simulations, and data-centric tweaks such as synthetic augmentation or bias mitigation. It also includes sandbox-like interface for prototyping in minutes. Tinker is currently in private beta with a free tier for small experiments (e.g., <1B params), and it is already being used by research groups at universities like Princeton, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Scaling to pay-per-compute-hour models starting at USD 0.50/hour for mid-tier GPUs.

4. SerpApi

SerpApi is a real-time web search API that makes it easy to get structured search results from Google and other search engines. It can fetch organic results, news, images, shopping listings, maps, and knowledge-graph boxes, and deliver in a clean JSON (or optionally raw HTML). The API handles the complex parts for you, including solving CAPTCHAs, rendering JavaScript, managing proxies, and mimicking real user behavior, so you get accurate and up-to-date results. You can control many parameters, including search query, language, location, device type, search type, pagination, and output format. This makes it easy to fine-tune the data you receive. Pricing starts with a free tier that gives 250 searches per month. Paid plans include Developer at USD 75 for 5,000 searches, Production at USD 150 for 15,000 searches, and Big Data at USD 275 for 30,000 searches. All plans are month-to-month, with 99.95% uptime for paid options and custom high-volume plans available.

5. MOSTLY AI Generator API

MOSTLY AI Generator API helps you create realistic, privacy-safe data from your real datasets. You start by training a generator on your tables, CSVs, or databases. The generator learns patterns, correlations, and relationships in your data while keeping private information safe. After training, you can create as many new records as you need using the API or the Python SDK. It works with many data types, including numbers, categories, text, time-series, geolocation, and multi-table datasets. You can also do conditional sampling, rebalance distributions, or fill in missing values. The platform gives detailed reports so you can see how closely the synthetic data matches the original, including distributions and correlations. You can use this data for sharing safely across teams, testing machine learning models, or running experiments where using real data is risky. It gives you practical, flexible data you can trust for analytics, AI training, or research without exposing sensitive information.

Wrapping Up

These five APIs show how much you can do without building everything from scratch. OpenRouter makes working with multiple LLMs simple with one API key. Olostep gives you live web data and turns it into a structured format your models can use. Tinker lets you fine-tune and experiment with LLMs without complicated setups. SerpApi makes real-time search easy and reliable, and MOSTLY AI Generator API helps you create realistic, privacy-safe data for testing and experiments. Each one is powerful, but also beginner-friendly enough to try quickly.

Which APIs do you like the most? Have you tried any of these, or do you use others? Share your favorites in the comments below. I’d love to see what you’re working with :)

Kanwal Mehreen**** is a machine learning engineer and a technical writer with a profound passion for data science and the intersection of AI with medicine. She co-authored the ebook "Maximizing Productivity with ChatGPT". As a Google Generation Scholar 2022 for APAC, she champions diversity and academic excellence. She's also recognized as a Teradata Diversity in Tech Scholar, Mitacs Globalink Research Scholar, and Harvard WeCode Scholar. Kanwal is an ardent advocate for change, having founded FEMCodes to empower women in STEM fields.

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