Free Use Bible API Review (2026): 1,256 Bibles, No API Key

Starting price: Free
Free tier: Yes
Platforms: Web (JSON over HTTPS) - JavaScript/TypeScript SDK - SQLite and zip bulk download
Developer: AO Lab
Launched: 2024
Updated: Aug 5, 2026

1,256Translations served

1,004Languages

98 of 1,252Marked public domain by upstream source

NoneAPI key and published rate limit

11 GBFull corpus as SQLite

The verdict

The best keyless Bible API available, and the only one that hands you a per-translation licenceUrl in every response. Use it freely for reading and study features, and treat the front page promise of "no copyright restrictions whatsoever" as marketing rather than legal cover - only 98 of the 1,252 eBible.org-sourced translations are marked public domain by that source, so a commercial product should ship the public-domain subset and check the rest one at a time.

Try Free Use Bible API ↗

Opens bible.helloao.org

Two corrections before the review. The Apple listing that faith.tools attaches to this entry is not this product at all - it is Sacra Tabula, a Bible mapping app from Chainbreaker Technology LLC whose own store description says its English translations are sourced live from the Free Use Bible API. That is a consumer of the API, published by an unrelated developer, and it carries zero ratings. There is no App Store rating for the Free Use Bible API because it is not an app. The rating below is editorial.

The second correction is smaller but matters more. The listing describes an API with "no copyright restrictions," and the API's own home page says the same: "No usage limits, no API Keys required, and no copyright restrictions whatsoever (including for modification or commercial uses)." The first two halves of that sentence are true and verifiable. The third is not true of the corpus as published, and the rest of this review is largely about the gap - because for anyone shipping software, that gap is the whole decision.

What the Free Use Bible API actually is: a set of pre-generated static JSON files, served from Amazon S3 behind CloudFront, covering 1,256 Bible translations across 1,004 languages, plus seven commentaries and a cross-reference dataset of 344,799 links. There is no registration, no key, no quota, no billing and no dashboard. You issue a GET and you get JSON with headings, poetry indentation, words of Jesus and footnotes preserved. The code that builds it is MIT-licensed, and the whole corpus can be downloaded and self-hosted.

It is run by AO Lab, described on its own licence page as "a non-profit company dedicated to loving and living out the Word of God," funded by donations, and built in partnership with the Berean Bible team behind Bible Hub. We have filed it as a Bible website rather than an AI tool: third parties have wrapped it for language models, but nothing in the service itself is a model - it is scripture text delivered over HTTP, which is what a Bible website is.

✓ The good

No key, no quota, no account - the documentation states "No usage limits, no API Keys required," there is no sign-up flow to complete, and no rate-limit headers are returned. For a prototype, that is the difference between shipping tonight and waiting on an approval email.
Every response names its own licence - each translation object carries a licenseUrl field alongside id, name, website and a sha256 content hash. That single field is what makes responsible commercial use possible, and it is more than most free Bible sources publish.
Real bulk downloads, not a trickle of paginated calls - api.zip at 1.5 GB is the entire API as files you can unzip and serve yourself, bible.db is the whole corpus as an 11 GB SQLite database, and bible.eng.db is the English subset at 1.5 GB.
Static files on a CDN, correctly configured - responses come back from CloudFront with cache-control: max-age=86400, public and access-control-allow-origin: *, so browser code can call it directly and your own cache layer will actually work.
The Berean Standard Bible is genuinely unencumbered - the licence page states the Berean and Majority Bible texts are "officially dedicated to the public domain as of April 30, 2023" with "All uses are freely permitted" and attribution "appreciated but not required."
Commentaries and cross-references come with the same clarity - six of the seven commentaries (Adam Clarke, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Calvin, John Gill, Keil-Delitzsch, Matthew Henry) carry a CC0 public domain mark, Tyndale Open Study Notes is CC BY-SA 4.0, and the OpenBible cross-reference set is CC BY 4.0.
The exit path is documented, not implied - the licence page reproduces the MIT text in full for the API and its source code, and the CLI that builds the files publishes under the same terms.

✗ Watch out

The headline licence claim does not survive contact with the corpus - 1,252 of the 1,256 translations point their licenseUrl at eBible.org, and in eBible.org's own catalogue only 98 of the 1,251 that match a catalogue row carry "public domain" in the Copyright column. The other 1,153 name a copyright holder, most often Wycliffe Bible Translators, Inc.
Noncommercial terms are common upstream and are not surfaced in the API - in a sample of 28 of those 1,153 taken from eBible.org's per-translation licence pages, 15 were offered under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives 4.0, whose published wording is "You do not sell this work for a profit." Nine were Attribution-Share Alike 4.0, three were Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0, and one stated no machine-readable licence.
The licence page covers two translations out of 1,256 - the section headed "Your License to These Texts" discusses only the Berean Bible and Majority Bible. There is no per-translation permissions table, no commercial-use matrix and no statement about the other 1,254.
No search and no verse-level endpoint - the reference documents lists, books, chapters and a whole-translation file, and nothing else. The chapter JSON is the smallest addressable unit, so cross-translation word search or a single-verse lookup is something you build and host yourself.
No status page, no uptime commitment, no support contract - the MIT licence supplies the only warranty language, and it is the standard "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND." A donation-funded non-profit on free CloudFront egress is a real dependency to accept for a paid product.
Audio coverage is narrow and one SDK is all there is - the audio link map is populated for the Berean Standard Bible with three named readers (david, hays, souer) served from audio.bible.helloao.org, and comes back empty on the King James and American Standard responses. The SDKs page lists exactly one language binding, JavaScript/TypeScript.

Best for

Developers who need Bible text in JSON tonight without a key
Public-domain-only products shipping KJV, ASV, WEB or BSB
Missions and minority-language projects needing 1,004 languages
Teams that want to self-host the whole corpus offline

Avoid if

Products that must ship NIV, ESV, NKJV, NLT or CSB
Apps needing full-text search served by the provider
Commercial launches requiring a signed licence and indemnity
Anything needing a published uptime SLA or paid support

What Free Use Bible API is

The Free Use Bible API is a read-only JSON interface to a large library of Bible translations, run by the non-profit AO Lab. The base URL is https://bible.helloao.org/api/ and the shape is simple: available_translations.json lists everything, {translation}/books.json lists the books in one, {translation}/{book}/{chapter}.json returns a chapter, and {translation}/complete.json returns an entire Bible in one file - the Berean Standard Bible comes back at about 7.3 MB.

Book identifiers are the standard three-letter codes, so John 3 in the BSB is /api/BSB/JHN/3.json. Chapter responses carry structured content blocks typed as heading, verse or line_break, footnotes with caller characters and verse references, audio links keyed by reader name where they exist, and next and previous chapter links. Parallel endpoint families exist for commentaries at /api/c/ and datasets at /api/d/.

The licenceUrl field is the product

What separates this from every other keyless Bible endpoint is one field. Each translation object in every response includes licenseUrl - a link to the specific permissions statement for that specific text, alongside a sha256 hash of the content so you can tell whether it changed. That is engineering that takes the copyright question seriously, and it exists in the data even though the marketing copy above it says the question does not apply.

It also means the diligence is doable. If you intend to ship the Bible in Basic English, you follow eng_bbe's licenceUrl to eBible.org and read "public domain" in the catalogue. If you intend to ship the NET Bible, you follow eng_net's licenceUrl and find "Copyright 1996-2016 Biblical Studies Press, L. L. C." with permissions published at netbible.com/copyright. Same API, same free access, materially different obligations - and the API tells you which is which if you look.

Coverage: 1,256 translations, 1,004 languages, and what that number contains

The live catalogue returns 1,256 translations spanning 1,004 languages and 14,412,557 verses in total, with 21 right-to-left texts. English is the largest single language at 51 entries; Sanskrit is second at 22, then Ancient Greek at 10 and Spanish at 8. Every entry is available in JSON, and none in USFM despite the format field existing.

Read the shape, not just the total. Only 207 of the 1,256 are 66-book Bibles; 711 are 27-book New Testaments and the remaining 338 are partial - some are a single book. The Anindilyakwa English Bible is 6 books; Barkly Bible Portions is 1. That is a faithful picture of world Bible translation rather than a defect, but a developer sizing a language picker should know that four in five entries are not a whole Bible.

Which English translations you can actually ship

Of the 51 English entries, 48 draw their licence statement from eBible.org and 31 of those are marked public domain in eBible.org's catalogue: King James (and a KJV plus Apocrypha edition, and the Cambridge Paragraph KJV), American Standard 1901, ASV Byzantine Text, seven World English Bible editions including Catholic and British and Messianic variants, Darby, Young's Literal, Webster, Geneva 1599, Douay-Rheims 1899, Revised Version, Bible in Basic English, JPS TaNaKH 1917, Leeser Tanakh, Brenton and LXX2012 Septuagints, Tyndale NT, Noyes, Targum Onkelos Etheridge, Wycliffe portions and the Majority Standard Bible.

The remaining English entries name a live copyright holder even though the API serves them freely: NET Bible (Biblical Studies Press), Free Bible Version and Translation for Translators (both CC BY-SA 4.0 per eBible.org), Plain English Version (Wycliffe Bible Translators Australia, CC BY-SA 4.0), English LSV (Covenant Press), Orthodox Jewish Bible (Artists for Israel International), Unlocked Literal Bible, Text-Critical English NT, English Majority Text Version and Family 35 NT. Note also that eBible.org's KJV page records the UK Crown patent - printing the KJV in the United Kingdom needs permission from Cambridge, Oxford or Collins, and that "royal decree has no effect outside of the UK."

Self-hosting, and why the exit path is the strongest feature

Because the API is static files, mirroring it is a download rather than a migration. api.zip is 1.5 GB and unzips to the complete API for local serving. bible.db is 11 GB of SQLite, described by the project as making it "much easier to search through over 1000 translations for comparision and data analysis" - which is also the project acknowledging that searching is not something the hosted API does.

The MIT-licensed @helloao/cli, version 0.2.0 with a helloao binary, is the tool that generates those files, so a team can import its own USFM and produce output in the same shape. For a paid product depending on a donation-funded non-profit with no SLA, that is the mitigation: cache aggressively, pull the zip on a schedule, and be able to serve from your own bucket the day CloudFront stops answering.

Pricing

Best value

Hosted API

Free

Unlimited GET requests to bible.helloao.org/api with no key, no account and no published quota. All 1,256 translations, 7 commentaries and the cross-reference dataset are included. AO Lab is a non-profit funded by donations, with a Donate link in the documentation navigation; no paid tier of any kind is published.

Bulk download and self-host

Free

api.zip at 1.5 GB is the entire API as static files to unzip and serve locally. bible.db at 11 GB is the whole corpus as SQLite; bible.eng.db at 1.5 GB is the English-only subset. No registration, no download token, no per-seat cost - the same content, on your own infrastructure.

Donation

Amount not published

The documentation links to a Donate page rather than a price list. There is no published suggested amount, no tiered sponsorship, and no benefit attached to donating - donors get the same API as everyone else. Nothing about access changes if you never give.

There is nothing to price. No key, no plan, no metered tier, no enterprise contact form. The documentation navigation has a Donate link and the licence page has an email address, and that is the entire commercial surface.

That is worth stating plainly because the competing model costs real money or real paperwork. get.bible's directory of Bible data sets sorts the field into licensed and paid APIs, free APIs with usage limits, and Creative Commons or public domain sources, and notes that "There are many popular Bible versions and translations that have copyrights requiring licensing for legal use." The Free Use Bible API sits in the third bucket and charges nothing for it.

The real cost is diligence, and it is not zero. Verifying the licence status of a translation means following its licenseUrl to eBible.org, reading the copyright line and the permissions paragraph, and recording the result. For one text that is ten minutes. For a product offering a language picker across hundreds of texts, it is a project - and it is a project the API's front page tells you that you do not need to do.

The second cost is operational. Free means no credit, no support queue and no remedy - the only warranty language anywhere is the MIT disclaimer on the licence page. Budget for a cache and a mirror instead of a support plan.

Where Free Use Bible API falls behind

The blanket claim. "No copyright restrictions whatsoever (including for modification or commercial uses)" is the first thing a developer reads and the last thing that holds. Every matched entry is marked Redistributable in eBible.org's catalogue, which is why they are all here legitimately - but redistributable under Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives is not unrestricted, and a licence reading "You do not sell this work for a profit" is the opposite of a commercial grant. This review makes no allegation about any translation's copyright status; it records what the upstream source publishes and notes that the API's summary does not match it.

No search. The reference lists exactly four translation endpoints - available translations, books, chapter, complete - and the project itself points you at the 11 GB SQLite download when you want to search. Bible Hub, Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible all answer a word query in a browser; this API cannot, and neither can anything built on it unless the developer indexes the corpus themselves.

No verse addressing. The chapter file is the atom. Displaying John 3:16 means fetching all 36 verses of John 3 and filtering client-side - cheap at 9.8 KB for a KJV chapter, but it means a verse-of-the-day widget pulls a chapter, and there is no reference parser to turn "Jn 3.16-18" into a request.

No operational transparency. There is no status page at the documented site, no published uptime history, no incident log and no changelog of outages. The infrastructure claim is one sentence: "Hosted on the AWS network, the API is available anywhere in the world at low latencies." Responses do confirm S3 behind CloudFront with 24-hour cache headers, which is a sound architecture, but architecture is not a commitment.

One SDK and thin ecosystem documentation. The SDKs page lists JavaScript/TypeScript and nothing else, credited to a single contributor. Python, Swift, Kotlin, Go and PHP developers get raw HTTP and the OpenAPI-less reference page, which is fine for an API this simple and still less than a licensed provider ships.

Free Use Bible API vs. licensed APIs vs. Bolls Bible

There are three ways to get Bible text into software, and they trade the same two things: access and paperwork. The licensed route - API.Bible, the YouVersion platform, the ESV and NLT APIs - requires registration, a key and per-version agreements, and in exchange gives you the translations readers ask for by name plus a counterparty who has signed something. get.bible's directory sorts these into the paid and licensed bucket precisely because copyrighted versions "require licensing for legal use."

The Free Use Bible API is the opposite corner: no key, no cap, no contract, no NIV, no ESV, no NKJV, no CSB. Its 51 English translations are the public-domain classics plus openly licensed moderns plus the Berean Standard Bible, and its real advantage over every other free option is the 1,004-language tail and the licenseUrl on every record. If your product can be built on KJV, ASV, WEB and BSB - and a surprising number can - this is the least friction available anywhere, and the self-host path means you are not hostage to someone else's uptime.

Bolls Bible, which we rate 3.5, is the third corner and the instructive contrast. It serves modern translations that this API does not, with no licence page, no permissions page and no per-translation notice - only a disclaimer inviting reports of infringement, which is a takedown offer rather than a grant. We took no view there on the legal position and take none here. The difference is documentary: Bolls gives you more translations and no paper, this gives you fewer translations and a licence link on every one of them. For a hobby reader that ordering favours Bolls. For anything you intend to sell, it reverses completely.

The bottom line

For a developer who needs scripture in JSON without a key, this is the best thing on the internet, and the MIT code plus the 11 GB download means you can take it with you. Build on it - but ignore the front page and read the licenceUrl. Ship the public-domain subset with confidence, clear each additional translation individually, and remember that 1,153 of the 1,252 eBible.org-sourced texts name a living copyright holder whose terms, in a good number of the published cases, say you may not sell the work for a profit.

Alternatives to Free Use Bible API

Bolls Bible 3.5A keyless API and reader carrying modern translations this one does not, but with no licence page and only a takedown disclaimer in place of published permissions. More access, far less paper.

Bible Hub 4.6The Berean Standard Bible's home and the deepest free interlinear and parallel study site on the web. It is a website rather than an API, but it is where the one unencumbered modern English text in this API comes from.

OpenBible.info 4.4Source of the cross-reference dataset this API serves, licensed CC BY 4.0, plus topical and geographic scripture data. The obvious companion when you need links between verses rather than the verses.

STEP Bible 4.6Tyndale House's free scholarly tool with original-language tagging and downloadable open datasets. Stronger for lexical and morphological work; not a JSON API for application developers.API.Bible 4.0The licensed alternative: register, get a key, agree to per-version terms, and reach translations no free source carries. Choose it when a named modern version is a product requirement rather than a preference.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an API key or an account?

No. The documentation states "No usage limits, no API Keys required," there is no registration form, and requests to https://bible.helloao.org/api/available_translations.json succeed anonymously. Responses return access-control-allow-origin: * so browser-side code can call the API directly without a proxy.

What are the rate limits?

None are published, and no rate-limit headers are returned. The API is static JSON on Amazon S3 behind CloudFront with cache-control: max-age=86400, public, so ordinary traffic is absorbed by the CDN. Treat the absence of a published limit as an absence of a promise, not as a guarantee - cache responses on your side and honour the 24-hour cache window.

Which translations can I legally ship in a commercial product?

The unambiguous ones are the 31 English entries marked public domain in eBible.org's catalogue - King James, American Standard 1901, the World English Bible editions, Darby, Young's Literal, Webster, Geneva 1599, Douay-Rheims 1899, Revised Version, Bible in Basic English and the rest - plus the Berean Standard Bible and Majority Standard Bible, which the licence page says were "officially dedicated to the public domain as of April 30, 2023" with "All uses are freely permitted." Anything else needs its own check: follow the translation's licenseUrl and read the terms there. Note the KJV's UK-only Crown patent if you plan to print in the United Kingdom.

The site says "no copyright restrictions whatsoever." Is that accurate?

It is accurate for the texts the licence page actually addresses - the Berean and Majority Bibles - and for the MIT-licensed source code. It is not a description of the whole corpus, where only 98 of the matched eBible.org entries carry "public domain" in that catalogue's Copyright column and the rest are offered under Creative Commons terms that in many published cases forbid commercial sale or derivative changes. Every entry is marked redistributable by that source, so the API is serving them properly. The claim to distrust is the one about your rights, not the one about theirs.

Can I download everything and host it myself?

Yes, and this is the strongest reason to build on it. api.zip is 1.5 GB and contains the entire API as static files. bible.db is the whole corpus as an 11 GB SQLite database and bible.eng.db is the English subset at 1.5 GB. The MIT-licensed @helloao/cli (version 0.2.0, binary named helloao) generates the same file layout from USFM sources, so you can mirror, extend or replace the hosted service.

Does it include search, audio or commentaries?

Commentaries yes, audio partly, search no. Seven commentaries are served - Adam Clarke, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Calvin, John Gill, Keil-Delitzsch and Matthew Henry under a CC0 public domain mark, and Tyndale Open Study Notes under CC BY-SA 4.0 - plus 344,799 OpenBible cross-references under CC BY 4.0. Audio links are populated for the Berean Standard Bible with three readers and come back empty on the King James and American Standard responses. There is no search endpoint; the project points to the SQLite download for that.

Who runs it, and what happens if the funding stops?

AO Lab, described on the API's licence page as "a non-profit company dedicated to loving and living out the Word of God," built in partnership with the Berean Bible team behind Bible Hub and funded by donations with a Donate link in the documentation. There is no status page, no SLA and no support contract, and the only warranty language is the MIT disclaimer. The mitigation is architectural rather than contractual: the content is public-domain-or-openly-licensed static files that you are explicitly invited to download in bulk, so a shutdown costs you a deployment rather than your data.

Free Use Bible API