new features and usage-based pricing

[Jason Priem]

Hi all,

We just shipped a bunch of new stuff to the OpenAlex API, and we're also making a big change to how pricing works. Full details are in the blog post.

Here's the short version.

New features:

• Advanced search: proximity, exact matching, wildcards, and long queries (up to 8KB). 
• Semantic search (beta): search by meaning, not just keywords. 
• Full-text downloads: download PDFs and TEI XML for 60M open-access works
• Completely rebuilt developer docs at developers.openalex.org.

Usage-based pricing:

We're introducing usage-based pricing for the API. The data itself remains completely free — you can still download, share, and build on the full 480M-work dataset at no cost. We're doing this POSI-style: charging for the service (the API), not the data.

API keys are now required for all requests. Getting one is free and takes 30 seconds: create an account at openalex.org, then grab your key at openalex.org/settings/api.

Your free API key gets $1 of free usage per day. For most users, that's all you'll ever need. To give you a sense of scale: Grabbing all 694k works by Finnish authors costs about $0.70 — well within your daily free allowance. Searching costs $1 per thousand calls.

As a bonus: looking up a single work (or millions of them) by DOI or ID is now free.

For heavier search/filter/download usage, you can buy prepaid credits anytime. Organizations can get annual plans with volume discounts.

The blog post has full pricing tables, FAQs, and more context on why we're doing this and where we're headed. Very recommended if you're using OpenAlex:
https://blog.openalex.org/openalex-api-new-features-and-usage-based-pricing/

Thanks for your support!
Jason