Free vs Paid Astrology API: What You Really Get

A free astrology API is enough to build and test your app. For a live product, the free limits decide. Free plans limit how many calls you get, how fast you can make them, and sometimes which features you can use. On October 13, 2026, we read 7 astrology API pricing pages. Their free offers capped calls per day or per month, allowed only a few calls a minute, or ended after 14 days.

What paying buys is room. On the pages we read, paid plans had more calls and a faster rate limit. Some also had more features, email support or an uptime promise. A free plan can come with duties, too, such as a credit link on every page.

So ask two separate questions. First, will the free limits hold your traffic? Count your calls per month and in your busiest minute. Second, can you trust the answers at all? Price does not tell you that. Test any API, free or paid, in 3 ways before you build on it. Check one known chart against a trusted reference. Send a birth from a summer with daylight saving time. Then send bad input and read the error.

The rest of this post shows what each limit means and how to run each test.

What "free" means on 7 pricing pages

The word covers 5 different deals. Here is what we found on October 13, 2026. We do not name the companies, because their pages change.

The credits row needs the most care. On one free plan, 5,000 credits a month sounds like a lot. But a basic birth chart costs 50 credits there, and 100 in other languages, such as Hindi. So the free plan makes about 100 English charts a month, or 50 in Hindi. Always turn credits into the thing your app makes.

Speed: the per-minute limit

A monthly cap is easy to see. The per-minute limit, also called the rate limit, is easy to miss while you test alone. It is the number of calls one key may make in a minute.

One free plan we read allowed 1 request a second. Another allowed 5 requests a minute. At 5 a minute, if 6 users open a chart page in the same minute, one of them gets an error. That company's first paid plan allows 60 a minute, 12 times more.

This matters most for pages that make several calls. Take a kundli page, which shows a Vedic birth chart. Say it also shows the navamsa (a chart read for marriage) and the dasha periods. Those are the dates of a person's planetary periods. On our API, that page uses 3 calls. Divide the rate limit by 3 to get the users per minute you can serve.

Features, credit links, support and uptime

Calls are not the only thing a free plan holds back. Check these four, too.

Features. One free plan we read had birth charts, divisional charts, panchang and matching. It left out shadbala (a score of each planet's strength) and the Vimshottari dasha. Its paid plans had both. Western charts came only with its top plan. Check that your exact calls are in the free plan before you build on them.

Credit links and use. A free plan can ask you to credit it on your pages. One comparison guide describes a free horoscope plan that needs attribution and does not allow commercial use. Read the terms for both before your product goes live.

Support. One free plan offered community support, while its paid plans had email support. Check who answers when a chart looks wrong.

Uptime. Where a company wrote an uptime promise as a service level agreement (SLA), it sat on a paid plan. One company listed 99.9% on its second plan and 99.95% on its top plan. No free plan came with an SLA on the pages we read.

What our Free plan includes

On our API, every plan can call every endpoint. The plans differ only in their limits. Here is what the Free plan includes, in the words our pricing page and terms use:

Test keys need no link. Paid plans need none, with one exception. On the smallest paid plan, a public page with the daily sign horoscopes must link to us. The terms give the full rule.

The Free plan is for trying the API and for small projects. A Free account can be disabled without notice if the API is misused there, for example through several Free accounts used together. Over any limit, the API answers with status 429 and a Retry-After header. It never charges extra for calls.

Test 1: check one known chart against a reference

Every API, free or paid, should pass this test. Pick one birth, get the chart from the API, and compare it with a trusted source. Here is our sample request.

_John Doe, born Aug 15, 1990, 10:30 AM, New York (America/New_York)_

curl -X POST "https://apiforastrology.com/api/astrology/v1/planets" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ASTROLOGY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"year":1990,"month":8,"day":15,"hour":10,"minute":30,"second":0,"latitude":40.7128,"longitude":-74.006,"timezone":"America/New_York"}'

Our API returned Virgo rising at 19°56'06" on October 13, 2026. The rising sign, or lagna, is the sign rising in the east at birth. The Moon was in Taurus at 24°34'30", in the 9th house. Its nakshatra (birth star) was Mrigashira.

For the reference, use Swiss Ephemeris, an outside table of planet positions. We tested 11 charts from 1855 to 2026. Our planet positions match it to within 1.5 arcseconds on each, as our accuracy page shows. An arcsecond is 1/3,600 of a degree.

See it before you build. Our free kundli tool runs on this same call. Enter John Doe's birth and you get Virgo rising.

Test 2: send a birth from a daylight saving summer

New York was on daylight saving time on Aug 15, 1990. Its clocks ran at UTC-4, not the winter UTC-5. An API that skips this, or a form that sends a fixed winter offset, is 1 hour off.

We measured what 1 hour does. We sent John Doe's birth twice: once with the zone name America/New_York, and once with a fixed offset of -5.

One hour moved the rising sign into a new sign. It also moved the Moon into a different house, one of the 12 parts of the chart. Our houses are counted from the rising sign, so every planet's house moved by one. So send a zone name, not a number, and check that the answer says which offset it used. Ours does, in meta.timezone.

Test 3: send bad input and read the error

Send a request that cannot work and see what comes back. We sent John Doe's birth with the year 1849, before the range the planet data covers.

{
  "error": {
    "code": "invalid_input",
    "message": "The birth date must be between January 1, 1850 and December 31, 2149.",
    "field": "year"
  }
}

The status was 422. The answer names the field, and its code is one your program can check. A month of 13 got the same code, with field month. Look for 3 things in any API. The status code should match the problem. The error code should never change, and the field at fault should be named. Our errors page lists every code and says when to retry.

Ready to try the tests? The quickstart walks through a first call, and the authentication page explains keys and rate limits.

When free is enough, and when to pay

Use the free plan while you build, and for a small project with light traffic. Move to a paid plan when one of these is true:

The 3 tests tell you whether to trust an API. The limits tell you which plan to pick. Run the tests first, on the free plan, then pay for the room your traffic needs.