6 Best APIs for Free Forever in Nigeria

Nager.Date Holidays API is a free, open-source REST API that provides public holiday data for over 100 countries, including Nigeria, enabling applications to programmatically determine which dates are national public holidays and automatically account for them in scheduling, delivery, business logic, and calendar functionality. The API returns structured lists of public holidays for a specified country and year, with holiday names in English and local languages, dates, and classifications. Nigerian public holidays covered by Nager.Date include all federally designated public holidays: New Year's Day (January 1), Workers' Day (May 1), Democracy Day (June 12), Independence Day (October 1), Christmas Day (December 25), and Boxing Day (December 26), as well as variable-date Islamic holidays including Eid el-Fitr (end of Ramadan), Eid el-Adha (Feast of Sacrifice), and Maulid al-Nabi (Prophet's birthday). The Islamic holiday dates are calculated approximately — as the exact dates depend on lunar moon sighting which can vary by one or two days from calculation — but Nager.Date provides the expected observed date as an approximation. For Nigerian scheduling applications — appointment booking systems, delivery management platforms, HR tools for leave management — knowing which dates are public holidays allows the application to correctly exclude non-working days from business day calculations. A Nigerian e-commerce platform calculating expected delivery dates needs to account for public holidays when computing working-day delivery windows; an appointment booking system for clinics or professional services needs to block holiday dates from the booking calendar automatically. Payroll applications for Nigerian businesses use public holiday data to correctly calculate overtime pay for employees who work on public holidays, which under Nigerian labor law is compensated at a higher rate than regular working days. Automated payroll systems that integrate Nager.Date can flag worked days that fall on public holidays and apply appropriate compensation rates without manual calendar checking by HR staff. The API is completely free to use with no authentication required, no rate limiting documentation for reasonable use, and no account registration needed. A simple HTTP GET request with the country code (NG for Nigeria) and year returns a JSON array of holiday objects. This simplicity makes integration achievable in minutes — Nigerian developers can add public holiday awareness to their applications with a few lines of code using any HTTP client in any programming language. The open-source nature of Nager.Date means that the holiday data underlying the API is publicly maintained and can be verified or corrected through the GitHub repository. For Nigerian developers who find inaccuracies in the Nigerian holiday dates — particularly for the annually variable Islamic holidays — the open-source model allows community correction of the data rather than relying on a proprietary provider to maintain accuracy. HR and attendance management systems for Nigerian companies use public holiday data to automatically generate yearly holiday calendars for employees, configure attendance tracking systems to treat public holidays as non-working days, and enable leave management systems to correctly count only working days against employee leave balances. These automations depend on accurate, programmatically accessible public holiday data for each calendar year. Multi-country support makes Nager.Date valuable for Nigerian businesses with operations or customers in multiple countries. A Nigerian company operating across West Africa can use the same Nager.Date API to retrieve holiday calendars for Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and other countries, building multi-country business calendar awareness into a single integration. Similarly, Nigerian-developed SaaS products sold to customers in multiple countries can use Nager.Date to localize their scheduling and business calendar functionality for each customer's country context.

Disify is a free disposable and temporary email detection API that identifies throwaway email addresses used to bypass registration systems. The Disify API checks whether a submitted email address belongs to a known disposable email provider (such as Mailinator, Guerrilla Mail, or 10minutemail) and returns a simple verdict. Nigerian developers and SaaS platforms use the Disify API to prevent fake signups, protect trial abuse, and keep email lists clean by rejecting temporary addresses at the point of registration.

Open-Meteo is a fully free and open-source weather API that provides high-resolution global weather forecasts, historical weather data, and climate projections without requiring any API key for non-commercial use. Built on top of state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) models from ECMWF, GFS, Meteo France, DWD, and other meteorological agencies, Open-Meteo delivers hourly and daily weather variables across the globe with up to 16-day forecast horizons and access to decades of historical weather records. For Nigerian developers building weather-dependent applications who want a zero-cost starting point, Open-Meteo is one of the most capable free weather APIs available. Forecast data from Open-Meteo covers a wide range of weather variables: temperature at 2 meters, apparent temperature (feels like), precipitation, rain, showers, snowfall (unlikely in Nigeria but globally relevant), cloud cover, wind speed and direction at multiple heights, wind gusts, surface pressure, relative humidity, dew point, visibility, shortwave solar radiation, and cape (Convective Available Potential Energy for thunderstorm prediction). For Nigerian agricultural apps, the combination of precipitation forecasts and solar radiation data is particularly valuable for irrigation scheduling and solar energy production forecasting. The API returns data in hourly or daily resolution, selectable per request. Hourly data enables fine-grained analysis of weather through the day — important for Nigerian logistics operations planning around Lagos or Abuja rush-hour weather, or for event managers checking window-by-window rain probabilities for an outdoor concert. Daily data provides simplified summaries including max/min temperature, precipitation sum, sunrise/sunset times, and UV index maximum — ideal for Nigerian travel apps showing week-ahead weather summaries. Historical weather data through Open-Meteo is available from 1940 to the present via the Historical Weather API endpoint, sourced from the ERA5 reanalysis dataset by ECMWF. Nigerian climate researchers, agricultural historians, and developers building data analytics tools for climate trend analysis can access decade-long weather records for any location in Nigeria including remote northern and southern regions without subscription costs. This historical depth rivals expensive commercial weather data providers. Marine forecasting is supported through a separate marine endpoint returning wave height, wave direction, wave period, swell height, and ocean surface temperature — relevant for Nigerian fishing communities, port operators in Lagos and Apapa, and oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf of Guinea. The marine data combined with standard atmospheric forecasts gives a complete picture of weather-related conditions for offshore and coastal Nigerian operations. Air quality forecasting from Open-Meteo includes PM2.5, PM10, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide concentrations, UV index, and European and US Air Quality Index calculations. Nigerian urban health apps monitoring air quality in Lagos (which has significant vehicle and industrial air pollution) can use the air quality forecast to send pollution warnings and health advisories to users. Climate projections through the Open-Meteo Climate API provide future temperature and precipitation projections from CMIP6 climate models, allowing comparison of projected future climate against the historical baseline. Nigerian policy researchers and environmental NGOs can use these projections to model climate change impacts on Nigerian agriculture, water resources, and urban heat islands. Open-Meteo is free for non-commercial use with no API key required — just call the endpoint with latitude, longitude, and the desired weather variables. Commercial use requires a subscription which remains affordable at under $50/month for most volumes. The API is highly reliable, well-documented, and used by thousands of developers worldwide, making it a strong foundation for any Nigerian weather-aware application.

Website Carbon API estimates the carbon footprint of any website by analyzing the data transferred per page load and calculating the resulting CO2 emissions based on the energy consumed by data centers, networks, and end-user devices that serve and render the page. As sustainability reporting becomes a growing expectation for Nigerian businesses, technology companies, and organizations seeking international investment or partnerships, the Website Carbon API enables developers to build green tech tools, sustainability dashboards, and web performance optimization workflows that include environmental impact metrics alongside traditional performance metrics. The carbon estimation methodology used by Website Carbon considers the amount of data transferred per page visit (in bytes), the energy intensity of the global internet infrastructure, and carbon intensity of the electricity grid powering the data centers where the website is hosted. The API checks whether the hosting provider is a verified green hosting provider using renewable energy — a distinction that significantly affects the carbon estimate, since green-hosted sites produce roughly 0.6 times the emissions of conventionally hosted sites. Nigerian tech companies that host on providers certified for renewable energy use can communicate this advantage through carbon rating displays powered by the Website Carbon API. The API returns a carbon rating (A+ through F) alongside the numeric estimate of grams of CO2 produced per page visit, the percentage of websites that produce less CO2 than the queried site, and whether the site's hosting is classified as green. This rating system makes environmental impact instantly communicable to non-technical stakeholders — a Nigerian company's CSR report can state "our website is rated A for carbon efficiency" rather than explaining grams of CO2 to non-technical executives. Website carbon badges are a popular use case: displaying a small widget on a website that shows its carbon rating in real time, demonstrating environmental commitment to visitors. Nigerian tech startups and digital agencies that want to signal sustainability values to clients and the international investment community can integrate the Website Carbon API to show their site's carbon rating. Some Nigerian web development agencies have begun offering "green web audits" as a service that includes carbon footprint assessment. Digital sustainability auditing for Nigerian organizations can be powered by the Website Carbon API as part of a broader web performance and sustainability audit tool. Combining carbon estimates from Website Carbon with Core Web Vitals data, image optimization analysis, and hosting provider assessment gives a holistic picture of a website's environmental and performance efficiency. Nigerian web agencies can differentiate by offering such sustainability audits as part of their service offering. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting requirements are growing in Nigeria, particularly for companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) and those seeking international investment. Tech companies and digital businesses can use Website Carbon API data as one quantified data point in their environmental impact reporting, demonstrating carbon-consciousness in their digital operations alongside broader energy efficiency and waste reduction initiatives. The Website Carbon API is completely free with no authentication required and no usage limits documented, making it immediately accessible for Nigerian developers experimenting with sustainability features. Simply pass a URL as a query parameter and receive the carbon estimate and rating in JSON format. The API is rate-limited in practice to prevent abuse, but for typical sustainability dashboard use cases serving Nigerian users, the free and open access model is more than sufficient.

The Movie Database (TMDB) API is one of the most comprehensive and widely used entertainment metadata APIs, providing structured data on movies, TV series, people (actors, directors, writers), production companies, and streaming availability across a database of millions of titles. TMDB is community-maintained with millions of contributions from fans and developers worldwide, making its catalog one of the most comprehensive entertainment databases available through a free API — particularly strong in Hollywood productions, international cinema, and global TV content. TMDB covers a broad spectrum of entertainment content with strong depth in major Hollywood films, international cinema including African film, major TV series across global streaming platforms, animated content, and documentary programming. Nigerian Nollywood films with international distribution are increasingly represented in TMDB's database as the global reach of Nigerian cinema has grown. The API's movie search returns structured data including titles, synopses, release dates, genres, production countries, and poster artwork — providing the metadata foundation for entertainment applications. Movie search and discover functionality allows querying by title text, genre, release year range, rating threshold, language, and production country. A Nigerian entertainment app specifically wanting to surface Nollywood or African cinema can filter by production country to find films produced in Nigeria. Combined with genre filtering, this enables building curated African cinema discovery features backed by TMDB's database without independent content cataloging. TV series data in TMDB covers episode information, season details, air dates, network information, and episode synopses for tracked shows. For Nigerian viewers following international series on streaming platforms, TV tracking apps built on TMDB data can notify users of new episode releases, track watched progress, and discover similar shows based on genre and cast overlap. People data for actors, directors, and crew members includes biographical information, birthday, nationality, filmography (movies and TV shows the person has appeared in or worked on), profile photos, and popularity scores. For entertainment platforms building actor profile features or cast discovery, TMDB's people database provides the biographical and career history data needed without independent database maintenance. Images from TMDB span multiple types and sizes: movie and show poster images, backdrop/fanart images, actor profile photos, and production company logos. All images are served from TMDB's image CDN and are available at multiple size configurations. The comprehensive image availability makes TMDB particularly valuable for building visually rich entertainment browsing interfaces — poster grids, featured content banners, and cast photo strips all use TMDB image assets. The Discover endpoint is one of TMDB's most powerful features, allowing complex filtered queries across the entire movie or TV database. Filters can combine genre, certification (content rating), cast members, keywords, release year range, vote average threshold, runtime range, and streaming provider availability. This enables building sophisticated content discovery experiences — "award-winning Nigerian films from the last five years rated above 7.0" — that surface relevant content without building complex filtering infrastructure independently. TMDB is free to use for any application with attribution to TMDB as the data source. API key registration is required but immediate. The free tier provides generous request limits sufficient for most Nigerian app scenarios. TMDB's permissive API usage terms and high quality, community-maintained database make it the preferred choice for Nigerian developers building movie and TV applications that need comprehensive, current entertainment metadata.