AskNews

What it is

A news API written for the thing on the other end being a language model rather than a page. Ask in natural language and GET /v1/news/search returns either a prompt-optimised string you paste straight into a context window or structured dictionaries, your choice per call. The pitch is that you do not run a news RAG stack — Emergent Methods runs the crawling, licensing, cleaning and indexing, and sells the endpoint.

Around the search endpoint sit DeepNews, an agentic research loop that plans and branches across news, Google, Wikipedia, X and Reddit; Stories, which clusters articles into evolving narratives; natural-language Alerts over news, X and Telegram; live web, Reddit and Wikipedia search; and a forecasting endpoint. Scopes are fixed on the key when you create it and checked at the gateway, so calling an endpoint your credential lacks returns a 403 that no retry will fix.

Pricing

Two meters. Credits pay for actions; tokens pay for the text those actions move, in three tiers called Lite, Standard and Advanced and priced per million. Pay as you go costs nothing a month and includes 25 credits plus 150,000 Lite and 150,000 Standard tokens, after which credits recharge at $0.025 and tokens at $5 and $12 a million. A card is required to begin even at zero.

The paid plans buy a lower rate as much as a larger allowance: Pro at $7.99 drops credits to $0.02, Spelunker at $250 to $0.015 and doubles the rate limit, Analyst at $1,000 to $0.01 and quadruples it. Enterprise is advertised as low as $0.0015. Higher tiers also unlock tools rather than only volume — X and Charts and Websearch at Spelunker, Reddit and premium paywalled sources at Analyst — so a cheap plan is missing capability, not just headroom.

Data & coverage

The vendor claims over 200,000 global sources, more than 500,000 new articles indexed a day and 200 million historical articles, with a 99.9% SLA and sub-100ms real-time response. The archive starts in 2023.

Articles come back enriched well past a headline: an English title beside the original, a summary, key points, full text, named entities across two dozen classes, a sentiment integer, a continent, a bias label from a seventeen-type taxonomy, a reporting-voice label from twelve, a page rank for the source, cluster distance and a ready-made markdown citation. Filters cover 50 languages, countries, continents, categories including Finance and Business, a geographic radius or polygon, and source allow- and block-lists. Geo-coordinates and the entity-relation graph are the exception: both are Analyst tier and above, which is the $1,000 plan.

Integrations

An MCP server and a CLI are the vendor's first two recommendations, ahead of raw HTTP. The CLI ships on npm as @emergentmethods/asknews-cli with a published agent skill manifest; SDKs are asknews on PyPI (0.14.3, September 2026, from Emergent Methods) and an equivalent TypeScript client, plus a LangChain integration. The OpenAPI spec, an llms.txt and per-page Markdown are all served, which is the least a product with this pitch could do and more than most manage.

Limitations

• Self-serve plans are internal use only. Redistribution and putting the content into a product require Enterprise. The plan matrix says it in one line and it governs everything else.
• The archive begins in 2023, which is short for a backtest and is the single biggest gap against the finance-first APIs in this category.
• No security identifiers. Entities are NER classes; there is no ticker, ISIN or exchange anywhere in the schema, and the Finance category is a topic filter, not an instrument map.
• The published terms of service do not match the product. Dated 5 January 2024, they grant content for "personal, non-commercial purposes only" and bar redistribution, while the plan page sells commercial API tiers — a website agreement never rewritten for the API. The clause that does read as written for it says API access prohibits recreating news articles or competing with news publishers.
• Cost is hard to predict. The bill depends on how much text a query happened to pull back.
• Sentiment is a single integer per article, with no published scale or model description.

Alternatives

Bigdata.com is the same idea from a finance-native vendor, with premium news back to 2000 and a licence that forbids storing anything at all. For a feed that names the security instead of the organisation, Finlight and Marketaux both resolve tickers, over corpora a fraction of the size — and both start at $29 a month, which is more than AskNews charges for Pro. TickerTick is free, needs no key, and is the right answer when the budget is zero and the corpus can be shallow.

Compare it against the rest of the market data APIs.