API.Bible Review (2026): Licensed Bible Text, 5K Free Calls

Starting price: Free, then $29+/mo
Free tier: Yes
Platforms: Web (REST over HTTPS) - any client that can send an api-key header - FUMS JavaScript tracker required in web apps
Developer: American Bible Society
Launched: -
Updated: Aug 5, 2026

5,000 API calls / monthStarter allowance

150,000 API calls / monthPro allowance

3Licensed Bibles on the free tier

From $10 / monthCommercial licence per translation

Every 30 daysCached text must be rechecked

The verdict

API.Bible is the only self-serve route a small team has to the NIV, NLT, CSB and NASB, and that route is priced in public rather than negotiated. Take the free Starter tier if your project is non-commercial and fits inside 5,000 calls a month; budget for Pro plus a per-translation fee the moment there is an ad, a subscription or an upsell in the product. Skip it if you need to self-host a full text, train a model on Scripture, or ship audio.

Try API.Bible ↗

Opens api.bible

Two things about the listing. API.Bible has no App Store or Play Store entry because it is not an app - it is a REST API, a developer portal and a stack of licence agreements, run by the American Bible Society out of 101 North Independence Mall East in Philadelphia. And the headline count that trails this product around directory listings, nearly 2,500 versions across more than 1,600 languages, is not a figure API.Bible prints anywhere today. Its own documentation says "hundreds of open access Bibles" and stops there. What you get depends on your plan and on which agreements you signed.

That vagueness matters less than it looks, because nobody chooses this API for breadth. They choose it for one line in the docs: licensing Bibles has historically "had to be repeated for every translation required", and API.Bible "solves this hurdle for digital Bible use." The named versions are the ones readers ask for by title - NIV, NKJV, NASB, NLT, CSB, The Message, the Amplified Bible, GNT. No keyless public-domain API carries any of them, and most publishers will not answer a solo developer's email. API.Bible answers with a checkout page.

The metering is simple. Starter is $0 a month, includes "5,000 API calls per month", lets you "Pick 3 of your favorite copyrighted Bibles" plus the whole public domain and Creative Commons repository, and is "Strictly non-commercial use. No ads, fees, freemium models or upsells allowed." Pro is "$29+ / Month" for 150,000 calls. Enterprise plans are marked "Coming soon" behind a contact form. Commercial rights to a copyrighted translation cost extra, "starting at $10/mon per translation", rising to $250 per month per Bible at the 100,000-user band.

The part to understand before committing is that the licence does not stop at the fee. The Terms and Conditions bundle five agreements - a Statement of Orthodoxy, a Minimum Acceptable Use Agreement, a Non-Commercial Agreement, a Commercial Agreement and the Terms of Service - and between them they require digital rights management in your product, cap printing at 100 verses, prohibit AI training on the text, reserve an audit twice a year, and give you 24 hours to pull a translation if a publisher withdraws it. None of that is hidden. It is also not on the pricing page.

✓ The good

One agreement instead of a publisher-by-publisher negotiation - the docs state you "only need to sign one license" to reach a catalogue assembled from "dozens of IP holders". No free API replicates it.
A real free tier with real modern translations - $0 a month buys 5,000 calls, the full public domain and Creative Commons repository, and your pick of up to 3 licensed copyrighted Bibles for non-commercial use.
Commercial pricing is published rather than quoted - $10 per month per translation to start, then a printed per-Bible ladder of $25 at 5,000 users, $75 at 20,000, $150 at 50,000 and $250 at 100,000.
Open-access versions are commercially usable at no extra charge - the homepage states many of them "come ready for revenue generating use with your API.Bible plan at no extra cost."
Licence status travels with the data - copyright detail comes back in /bibles metadata with full details enabled, and the public Bibles page filters by commercial use, licence class, media type and Catholic imprimatur.
One format across the whole catalogue - every Bible is served as USX, the standard the docs note is used by the Digital Bible Library, YouVersion and SIL Global, and DBL card holders can reach their own DBL Bibles through the same API.
Search is built in - the /search endpoint takes keywords or a reference, supports wildcards and sorts by relevance or canonical order.

✗ Watch out

The free allowance is thin for anything user-facing - 5,000 calls a month is roughly 166 a day, and Starter is the one plan where overage cannot be purchased, so the service stops rather than bills.
"Non-commercial" is defined harshly - no ads, in-app purchases, freemium or paid subscriptions and no fundraising, exempting only "minor, non-intrusive links for receiving tithes and/or donations", an exemption that "does not apply to for-profit companies" and is "revocable at the discretion of API.Bible at any time, for any reason."
You are contractually required to build DRM - the Terms oblige you to incorporate industry-standard DRM restricting copying and distribution, capping printing at 100 verses, restricting use to the Territory, and limiting the product to the number of devices you declared at sign-up.
Publisher withdrawal is your emergency, not theirs - withheld or reclassified content must go "as soon as possible, and in any case within twenty four (24) hours after a written request", and an unpaid or terminated plan means stripping all API.Bible content within 72 hours.
AI use is off the table without two signatures - training generative AI or LLMs on any copyright content is prohibited, and the clause explicitly extends to Creative Commons licensed content, requiring written consent from both API.Bible and the IP holder.
The audit clause reaches your infrastructure - up to twice per calendar year, with access to your records, systems and facilities plus free access to your apps for ABS and IP holders, and you pay for the audit if underpayment exceeds 5% of fees.

Best for

Apps that must ship a named modern translation such as NIV, NLT or CSB
Church and ministry sites with no revenue and modest traffic
Commercial products that need a documented licence chain and a counterparty
Teams already working in USX or holding a Digital Bible Library card

Avoid if

You need to bulk-download or self-host a complete Bible text
Your product trains or fine-tunes a model on Scripture
You want no registration, no key and no agreement to sign
You need audio, video or sign-language Scripture without a separate licence

What API.Bible is

API.Bible is a REST API that returns Bible text, and a licensing desk attached to it. You register, create an app, pick translations, and call endpoints for bibles, books, chapters, verses, passages, sections, search and audio using an api-key header. Each Bible has a 16-digit ID plus a publication suffix - the NIV is 78a9f6124f344018-01.

It is run by the American Bible Society, which also runs the Digital Bible Library, and the catalogue splits three ways: open access Bibles on every plan, popular copyrighted Bibles under a Standard License with a paid plan, and a further set requiring a Unique License agreed directly with the IP holder. Which bucket a version sits in is the first thing to check.

What you are buying is a counterparty, not a catalogue

Every other Bible API competes on breadth or on being free. API.Bible competes on having signed something. The pitch is "everything you need to get the Bible into your app, all under a single license", and for a two-person team that wants the NLT in a paid app that is the difference between shipping and not shipping. Crossway, by contrast, states its policy is "to license to organizations, not to individuals or solo developers", and most publishers behave the same way.

The boundary deserves stating precisely, because the marketing does not. The grant is "personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable" and "revocable at our discretion", and the Terms add that "API.Bible does not grant you license to use any Third Party IP Content offered via API.Bible." Some versions still need a direct end-user agreement with the rights holder, whose citation rules then override API.Bible's - while you must still cite API.Bible too. The paperwork is dramatically reduced, not eliminated.

The three licence classes, and how you get a specific modern translation

The Bibles page sorts everything into open access, Standard License and Unique License. Open access covers public domain and Creative Commons versions and is on every plan including Starter. Standard License covers the popular copyrighted Bibles and needs a paid plan. Unique License versions need "a Unique License agreement with the IP holder" - a direct contract between you and the publisher, brokered through the platform rather than replaced by it. The public table filters by commercial use, licence class, media type and Catholic imprimatur, but the Bible IDs only appear once you are logged in.

Getting a version that is not in the catalogue is a support ticket, not a purchase. Developers are told "if there is a particular translation you would like help in pursuing access to, please don't hesitate to contact us at support@api.bible to discuss further." That is honest, and it is the ceiling on the promise. API.Bible has done the licensing for what it lists; for anything else you are in a queue with ABS advocating rather than deciding.

Caching, storage and attribution: what you may keep and what you must show

Caching is permitted and encouraged, under conditions published in three places that do not agree. The site FAQ says cached content "must be refreshed at least once every 30 days" to comply with the Terms and IP restrictions. The Terms agree, requiring you to "check at least every 30 days for content updates" and to delete or modify anything changed upstream. The developer documentation instead asks you to "limit it to fewer than 500 consecutive verses" and recommends you "clear your cache every 14 days or less." Build to 14 days and you satisfy both; build to the 30-day figure printed as the requirement and the docs consider your cache stale.

Attribution is tier-dependent and specified down to the string. The Acceptable Use Agreement prints the full form - abbreviation, translation name, copyright year, organisation, "Used by permission. All rights reserved." - plus a short form for constrained space. Starter users "are required to include a visible citation and hyperlink to https://api.bible"; Pro users are "encouraged, but not required" to. Web apps must also embed the Fair Use Management System tracker, which reports a request token, a device ID, a session ID and an optional hashed user ID back to ABS on every Scripture display.

Pricing

Starter

Free

Printed as "$0 / Month": 5,000 API calls per month, the public domain and Creative Commons repository, and your pick of 3 copyrighted Bibles. No overage protection available. Strictly non-commercial - no ads, fees, freemium models or upsells. A visible citation and hyperlink to api.bible are required, and accounts are limited to one Starter app.

Best value

Pro

$29+/month

Printed as "$29+ / Month": 150,000 API calls, with more at $1 per 1,000 in 1,000-call increments. Access to copyrighted Bibles with no stated cap, though the footnote warns not all Bibles are available for all uses. Attribution encouraged but not required. No annual price is published; billing is monthly in advance.

Commercial Bible licence

From $10/month per translation

Bought on top of a paid plan for each copyrighted translation used in anything that generates revenue. The published ladder reads $10 per month per Bible to start, then $25 at 5,000 users, $75 at 20,000, $150 at 50,000 and $250 at 100,000. Some versions are excluded outright: the footnote gives "NIV commercial use not available" as its own example.

Custom / Enterprise

Not published

Labelled "Coming soon", aimed at anyone needing enterprise allowance or "Scaling beyond 100K monthly users", with a contact form for early access. Limits are negotiated and no figure is printed, so this tier is budgeted by asking rather than by reading.

Starter at $0 and Pro at $29+ per month are the only two figures on the page, and the plus sign is doing real work. $29 buys the API allowance, not commercial rights to any copyrighted translation - those are separate, per translation, per month, and scale with your user count.

Run it on a modest paid app. Pro at $29 plus three commercial licences at the 50,000-user band, at the printed $150 per Bible per month, is $479 a month or $5,748 a year, assuming the ladder is additive to the subscription as the page presents it. The same three at the entry $10 rate would be $59 a month. No intermediate figures are given between the printed bands.

Pro billed monthly is $29 x 12 = $348 a year at the floor, with no annual plan or discount published. Nor is there a refund policy: the FAQ states "we do not have a formal satisfaction guarantee". Unused calls never roll over, and if a subscription lapses you cannot reinstate it - the docs say "you will need to create a new app within your existing account", which means a new API key in production.

The word "overage" is used two ways on the same site. The pricing page lists "No overage protection available" as a Starter limitation, implying its absence is a downside; the FAQ defines overage protection as "a feature that helps prevent unexpected charges by limiting the number of API calls you can make beyond your monthly subscription", which would make its absence a benefit. What is true is that Pro and Enterprise can configure a paid ceiling and Starter cannot, so on Starter the 5,000th call is the last one that month.

For contrast, Crossway's ESV API is free for non-commercial use and allows "5,000 queries per day, with no more than 1,000 requests in an hour and no more than 60 requests per minute." API.Bible's free tier allows 5,000 calls per month. Multiply the ESV daily figure by 30 and you get 150,000 - exactly the Pro allowance that costs $29 or more. For a project that only needs the ESV, API.Bible is not obviously the better side of that trade.

Where API.Bible falls behind

No bulk access, by design. The Terms prohibit downloading entire Bibles, creating derivative works, modifying the content at all, and systematically extracting data to populate databases. Keyless competitors hand over the whole corpus as a zip or a SQLite file; here the API is the only door, and if it is down your product has no text.

No audio, video or study content without a separate conversation. Audio Bibles exist as endpoints but the docs state availability "requires special licensing" and route you to support, audio is chapter-level and cannot be queried by verse, and copyrighted text may not be converted to audio. Video and sign-language Scripture are not available at all; commentaries and study Bibles are future ambitions.

No published catalogue count. For a service whose whole proposition is which Bibles it can license to you, the absence of a total - or of any per-language figure - is a strange gap. The docs say "hundreds", third-party directories repeat a much larger number the site no longer prints, and the list of Bible IDs sits behind a login, so a multilingual project cannot be scoped before sign-up.

A content-use clause broader than copyright. Beyond licensing, the Terms require that no "potentially controversial use" of the content is allowed, naming numerology, critical race theory and critical queer theory as examples, and the Acceptable Use Agreement requires content to maintain "the moral integrity, spirit, fervor, and message consistency of the Christian Bible and statement of orthodoxy" - that statement being the Apostles' Creed, reproduced in full as one of the five agreements accepted at account creation. Anyone building for an academic, interfaith or general-audience market should read those clauses first.

API.Bible vs. Free Use Bible API vs. Bolls Bible

These three are the same decision from three directions, and the variable is not text quality - it is who carries the licensing risk. API.Bible carries it and charges for it: you register, accept five agreements, embed FUMS, respect a cache recheck and a 100-verse print cap, and in exchange the American Bible Society has already signed with the publishers whose translations your users name. That is a counterparty, with a contract and a defined removal process.

The Free Use Bible API, which we rate 4.0, is the opposite corner. No key, no quota, no contract, 1,256 translations across 1,004 languages as static JSON, and bulk downloads including an 11 GB SQLite build of the corpus - all of which API.Bible's terms forbid. What it does not have is the NIV, ESV, NKJV or CSB, and its front-page claim of "no copyright restrictions whatsoever" holds for the public-domain subset rather than the full catalogue, which is why it publishes a licenceUrl on every record. If your product runs on KJV, ASV, WEB and BSB, it is strictly less friction.

Bolls Bible, which we rate 3.5, is the third corner: 146 translations in 31 languages, no key, no quota, bulk JSON and ZIP downloads, and modern majors including NIV, ESV, NASB and The Message in the same open endpoint as the public-domain texts. Its entire published copyright position is one sentence on a disclaimer page offering to remove content on request. What permissions sit behind that is not something anyone can determine from outside; what each service publishes is the point. API.Bible publishes per-version licence classes, a citation string and a named IP holder for every text. Bolls publishes a takedown offer. Free Use Bible API publishes a per-translation licenceUrl and lets you read the upstream terms yourself.

The bottom line

API.Bible does something genuinely hard and does it at a published price, which is why it is the default answer for any product that must display a translation by name. The free tier is real but small, the commercial tier stacks a per-translation fee on top of the subscription, and the agreements ask more of your engineering than the pricing page suggests. Read all five before you design your caching layer, price the per-Bible ladder at the user count you expect, and if your features can survive on public-domain and openly-licensed texts, look hard at the keyless options first.

Alternatives to API.Bible

Free Use Bible API 4.0The keyless counterpart: 1,256 translations in 1,004 languages, no quota, bulk SQLite and zip downloads, and a licenceUrl on every record. No NIV, ESV, NKJV or CSB - access traded for permission.

Bolls Bible 3.5A one-developer reader and open API serving 146 translations including modern majors, with no licence page and a single-sentence takedown disclaimer where permissions documentation would sit.

Bible Gateway 4.5Advertises 240 online Bibles in 78 languages, each licensed from its publisher, but as a reading site rather than a developer platform - no bulk text API and no self-serve licence to embed the text.

NET Bible 4.6One modern translation with an enormous notes apparatus and its own API, whose copyright page grants specific free uses in writing. The cheapest modern English text with documented permission.

YouVersion 4.9The other large licensed Scripture platform and a Digital Bible Library consumer, but built as a consumer app with a partner-gated developer programme rather than a self-serve API.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use API.Bible in a commercial product, and what does that cost?

Yes, with two purchases. First a paid plan - Pro at "$29+ / Month" for 150,000 calls. Then a commercial licence per copyrighted translation, "starting at $10/mon per translation", on a published per-Bible ladder of $25 at 5,000 users, $75 at 20,000, $150 at 50,000 and $250 at 100,000. Commercial use is defined broadly: advertising, licensing fees, in-app promotions, sponsorships, freemium models or paid access all count, and "anything that generates revenue is considered commercial". Many open-access versions are commercially usable at no extra cost; some copyrighted ones are excluded entirely, and the footnote names NIV commercial use as unavailable.

How do I get rights to a specific modern translation such as the NLT or the CSB?

If it is in the catalogue under a Standard License, you add it to a paid plan and the American Bible Society's agreement with that publisher covers you. If it carries a Unique License, the docs state you need "a Unique License agreement with the IP holder" - a direct contract between you and the publisher, arranged through the platform. If the version is not in the catalogue at all there is no self-serve route: you email support@api.bible and ABS may pursue access with the rights holder. That last case is the real limit on the "licensing is handled" promise.

Can I cache or store verse text, and for how long?

Yes, and the published rules disagree. The site FAQ and the Terms both set 30 days: cached content "must be refreshed at least once every 30 days" and you are "required to check at least every 30 days for content updates". The developer documentation instead asks you to keep caches under 500 consecutive verses and recommends clearing "every 14 days or less". Anything stored offline must also be deleted or modified when it changes upstream, and downloading entire Bibles is prohibited without written consent.

What attribution is required?

A copyright citation alongside every displayed passage, in a format the Acceptable Use Agreement prints in full - abbreviation, translation name, copyright year, organisation, "Used by permission. All rights reserved." - with a short form allowed where space is tight. Starter users must also show a visible citation and hyperlink to https://api.bible; Pro users are encouraged but not required to. Web apps must additionally embed the FUMS tracker; mobile-only apps with no web surface are exempt.

What happens to my app if a publisher withdraws a translation?

You remove it, fast, at your own cost. If content is deleted, gains protected status, or is otherwise suspended, withheld, modified or removed, you must delete or modify it "as soon as possible, and in any case within twenty four (24) hours after a written request" from API.Bible or the IP holder. Termination or non-payment triggers a 72-hour deadline to strip all API.Bible content from your product. The same section lets API.Bible discontinue any content at any time, requires you to implement changes "at your sole expense", and states it "will not be liable for damages of any sort that result from any Update". Plan for a version disappearing the way you would plan for a deprecated dependency.

Can I use API.Bible content to train an AI model?

No, not without two written consents. The Terms prohibit using any copyright content from API.Bible to train generative AI or large language models "without the express written consent of both API.Bible and the copyright content's IP Holder", and the clause explicitly extends to Creative Commons content. Related restrictions bite on AI features generally: AI-driven text-to-speech needs the IP owner's written consent, and ephemeral text-to-speech is allowed only for clearly marked public domain and compatible Creative Commons texts, one chapter at a time.

API.Bible