Keyless public API

An API usable without registration, keys or payment.

USGS Water Services is the exemplar in this catalog: every endpoint answers unauthenticated requests at no cost.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - USGS Water Services — "No key and no charge".

Access method sets your maintenance bill. Delivery routes change, layouts drift and scrapers rot quietly; whoever operates your pipeline inherits all of it, which is why access should be priced alongside the license itself.

The failure mode is concrete: the label appears in a listing, the delivered files tell a different story, and the gap surfaces mid-project when fixing it is most expensive.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and USGS Water Services lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open USGS Water Services and confirm its record — "No key and no charge" — against the files you actually receive.
2. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
3. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
4. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: multi-utilities data, water-utilities data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - api fair use rate limiting - commercial delivery terms 4.0 license - Provisional data disclaimer