Free API accounts now get more requests and free Structured Contents Snapshots

More developers are building on Wikimedia Enterprise APIs than ever, and many of them start with a free account. Over the past year, we’ve added parsed tables, references, citations, and article images to Structured Contents, expanded language coverage, and opened up Wikidata access through the On-demand and Realtime APIs. As that surface area has grown, so has the demand for more room to build on a free account. Today, the free account gets a substantial upgrade across the Snapshot and On-demand APIs, including free access to Structured Contents Snapshots.

What’s changing for Free Accounts

Three things are new. The On-demand API request limit is now 50,000 a month, a tenfold increase from the previous limit of 5,000 a month. The Snapshot API request limit has doubled from 15 to 30 a month. And Structured Contents snapshots, previously a paid feature, become available to free accounts with the next monthly Snapshot on 1 July 2026.

More room on the On-demand API

Free accounts now get 50,000 On-demand API requests every month, resetting on the first of the month just as they do today. That’s enough headroom to prototype, run a side project, or serve a small production workload without thinking about switching accounts. The On-demand API also continues to include free access to the Structured Contents articles beta endpoint, so you can pull a single article as structured JSON whenever you need it.

Monthly Snapshots, now with Structured Contents

The Snapshot API delivers full bulk dumps of a Wikimedia project. Free accounts now get 30 Snapshot requests a month, double the previous limit, with a fresh Snapshot of every supported project published on the first day of each month.

Thirty requests cover a lot of ground. You could pull 30 different language editions of Wikipedia, branch out to projects like Wikivoyage or Wikibooks, or spend them on Structured Contents Snapshots.

That last option is the big one: Structured Contents Snapshots are now free. Until now, free accounts could only get them through the public datasets on Kaggle and Hugging Face, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services. Now you can pull the most recent Structured Contents Snapshot, in the language you want, directly from your account, starting with the first monthly Snapshot run on 1 July 2026.

Get more out of Structured Contents

Since launch, Structured Contents has grown into one of the most popular ways to work with Wikipedia data. It pre-parses entire articles into clean JSON, so instead of writing parsers to pull what you need out of raw article content, you filter for exactly the fields you want. Recent releases parse out references and citations, tables, article-body images, nested and ordered lists, and credibility signals like referenceneed and referencerisk. Its structure also makes it straightforward to convert into other formats, like Markdown.

Learn more about Structured Contents

Availability and Support

If you already have a free account, you don’t need to do anything. These upgrades are already enabled on every existing free account, not just new ones. Your dashboard now shows your On-demand and Snapshot usage, as well as how many requests you have left. The monthly Snapshot cadence begins on the 1st of July, 2026, and credits reset on the first of each month.

If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for instant access to the free Snapshot and On-demand APIs, and our reference documentation will help you get the most out of the endpoints.

Need more than the free account offers? Higher On-demand limits, daily Snapshot dumps, and expanded Structured Contents access are available on paid accounts. Our support team is reachable through your dashboard, and our sales and product teams can help you scale when ready.

Photo Credits

Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons