Free eBay API in 2026: What Is Free and Where It Stops

Type “free eBay API” into Google and the honest answer is yes, with limits. eBay runs a developer program that costs nothing to join, and its own pages promise a free access tier with no time limit. What you cannot get for free is the data most people actually search for: sold prices.

We read eBay's developer pages and every vendor's pricing page on 2026-10-23 and did the maths from them. Nothing here comes from running anyone's product, so there are no speed or success-rate numbers. Where a page printed no figure, we write “not verified.” Serpent sells one of the options below, so the arithmetic is shown; its paid calls start at $0.40 per 1,000.

The options at a glance (read 2026-10-23)

One row per option. “Free” is what you get before paying anything. Each paid rate is in the unit that vendor bills, so read the second column before you compare the third.

What eBay's own API gives you for free

Start here, because it really is free. eBay's developer program lets you register, create keys and call its APIs without a fee. It is the one fully official route in this guide.

The free tier, as eBay states it

The sign-in panel on eBay's developer documentation says new accounts “include a free access tier,” with “no time limit” and “5,000 API calls per day.” It also lists a sandbox for simulated buying and selling, support forums, and a premium access tier with higher call limits and Developer Technical Support. We could not find a price for that premium tier on the pages we read.

eBay's API call limits page backs this up. The Browse API, which searches active listings, shows 5,000 calls a day for every method, and 5,000 a day for getItems on top. The page explains the idea: “Our default API call limits are designed for individuals and smaller businesses.”

The free arithmetic

• 150,000 calls in a 30-day month. That is 5,000 a day.
• A watchlist of 500 search terms, four checks a day. That is 2,000 calls a day, well inside the cap.
• A one-million-call job. At 5,000 a day it takes 200 days, so it needs a higher limit.

For a hobby project or prototype, that is generous. The Browse API overview shows search by keyword, category, GTIN, product ID and image, plus an item call with seller, shipping, return and review data.

How to get more calls

eBay's route is the Application Growth Check. The limits page says “If your volume increases, you can get higher limits after completing our Application Growth Check,” and that the check verifies your app follows the API License Agreement and uses the APIs efficiently. We could not read a fee, a timeline or an approval rate for the check, so we state none.

Where the official free route stops

Production access to the Buy APIs

This surprises people. eBay's Buy APIs requirements page says: “Many of the Buy APIs are a (Limited Release).” It adds that production use “is intended for eBay partners only” and that you apply through the eBay Partner Network. The call-limits table also marks Browse with a note that Buy APIs require an additional license.

The documented steps are: apply with a business model, wait for a reply (the page says within 10 business days), open a support ticket, then sign eBay contracts before production access is switched on. The page also warns that approval is not guaranteed. Sandbox access, by contrast, is open to anyone with a developer account.

We could not tell from these pages whether a brand-new key can call Browse in production on day one. Test it on your own account, and plan for the application route if it says no.

The licence that comes with the keys

Free access comes with the eBay API License Agreement. The page we read is dated September 3, 2025. We are not lawyers, and these are our reading of a long document, so read it in full. Four points matter to data projects.

• Call limits are enforceable. Section 3.3 says eBay reserves the right to limit your periodic calls and may suspend access if you exceed them.
• Freshness. Section 8.1.3 says listing information you display in your app can be no more than six hours older than eBay's site, and other content no more than 24 hours.
• Selling. Section 9.7 restricts selling, renting, distributing or otherwise commercialising eBay content beyond what the agreement allows.
• Pricing tools. Section 9.5 restricts using eBay content, alone or with other data, to suggest or model prices. A repricer needs legal review first.

Under section 16.2 eBay may also suspend access or end the agreement, so a free key you depend on can be switched off.

Sold and completed items: the gap nobody fills for free

People who search “ebay sold items api” usually want real sale prices. Here is what we could confirm.

• Browse does not return them. In a community reply, eBay Developer Support says the Browse endpoint does not return sold listings and only returns active items. It suggests asking an account manager about restricted APIs.
• The old Finding API is gone. eBay staff wrote in a forum thread that all Finding API calls would be decommissioned on February 5, 2025, and that sold data is “restricted.” The old findCompletedItems reference page now returns a not-found error.
• Marketplace Insights is the official sold-data API. eBay's docs, as shown in search results, describe it as a limited-release API for developers approved by eBay's business units, covering sales from the past 90 days. We could not read the page body ourselves, because it loads by script. We found no open application route.
• Paid scrapers are struggling too. SearchApi's docs say: “As of July 23, 2026, eBay requires signing in to view sold and completed listings,” so its sold filters no longer work. SerpApi says its Sold and Complete options are “deprecated and no longer supported,” and the Apify actor we read answers “Not with this Actor.”

Serpent does not offer sold or completed data either. Its eBay search returns active listings, with sort and condition filters. If sold prices are the whole project, no option in this guide delivers them reliably today. The honest paths are eBay's own seller tools by hand, or asking eBay about the restricted route. Ask anyone selling sold-price data for a live sample first.

The near-free eBay data APIs, one by one

These return eBay listings as JSON from a plain HTTP call, with no eBay partner application. Each entry names what it bills. Serpent comes first because its Default rate is below every entry rate we could read. The comparison table above lets you check that order yourself.

1. Serpent API

• Free: A free account gets 10 free calls, shared across all services. Our eBay API page and docs say core direct calls (search, item, seller, reviews and feedback) can spend them, while full item descriptions and background jobs need funded credit. You also get one free demo run a day on that page, no sign-up. That is small, and Bright Data's 5,000 records go further for testing.
• Paid: $0.40 per 1,000 calls on Default, $0.36 on Growth (one $100 deposit) and $0.28 on Scale (one $500 deposit). A full item with its description, opted in with include_description=1, is $1.50, $1.35 and $1.05 per 1,000. See the pricing page.
• Commitment: The first deposit is $10 minimum, which buys 25,000 Default calls by our arithmetic. There is no subscription, and deposited credits do not expire (promotional bonus credits do, after 30 days).
• What you get: Six endpoints under /api/ebay: search, item, seller profile, seller listings, product reviews and seller feedback. A listing has item ID, title, URL, price with currency, condition, shipping, seller, images and position. Item detail adds original price, availability, returns, location and item specifics. Ten marketplaces are available, from US and GB to DE, AU, IT, FR, CA, ES, NL and PL. Search takes sort, condition, min_price, max_price and pages 1 to 20.
• Jobs: The four list routes have POST job forms for 1 to 20 pages. They bill by pages delivered, need funded credit, and results stay readable for seven days.
• Watch out: No sold or completed data. The docs do not state how many listings one page holds, so check a sample before you do volume maths. A value that is missing comes back as null or [], so do not treat those as real zeros. Default allows 10,000 calls a day.

Cheapest? Not flatly. Within eBay's free 5,000 calls a day nothing beats free. Among the rates we could read, $0.40 on Default is below every entry rate, and $0.28 on Scale is among the lowest per-call figures. But Scrapingdog's Pro and Premium plans work out to about $0.33 and $0.29 per 1,000 requests at full use, which beats our Default and Growth rates. Its largest plan, Nova Pro at $30,000 a month for 1.1 billion credits, comes to about $0.14 per 1,000 requests, and Business Pro ($1,500 for 29 million credits) to about $0.26, both at 5 credits per eBay request and full use. Those plans need a large monthly commitment, and units differ between vendors, so treat Serpent as “among the lowest,” not “the lowest.”

2. SerpApi

• Free: The pricing page lists a free plan with 250 searches a month.
• Paid: Starter is $25 for 1,000 searches, Production $150 for 15,000, Searcher $725 for 100,000 and Cloud 1M $3,750 for a million. At full use that is $25 down to $3.75 per 1,000.
• What you get: A dedicated eBay search engine with eBay domains, 60, 120 or 240 results per page, and filters for buying format, price and condition.
• Watch out: Monthly plan, so a quiet month still costs the full price. The pricing page does not mention eBay, so we assumed one credit per eBay call.

3. SearchApi

• Free: 100 free requests, no card.
• Paid: Developer is $40 for 10,000, BigData $250 for 100,000 and Octo 1M $1,500 for a million. That is $4 down to $1.50 per 1,000 at full use.
• What you get: An eBay search engine with domain, price, condition, buying-format and sort options, and 60, 120 or 240 results per page.
• Watch out: Sold and completed filters stopped working on July 23, 2026, as quoted above. Monthly plan.

4. Scrapingdog

• Free: 100 credits to start, no card. That is 20 eBay requests.
• Paid: Lite is $40 for 200,000 credits, Standard $90 for 1,000,000, Pro $200 for 3,000,000 and Premium $350 for 6,000,000. Its eBay documentation says “Each successful request costs 5 API credits.” By our division that is $1.00, $0.45, $0.33 and $0.29 per 1,000 requests at full plan use. Its pricing page also lists much larger plans: Business Pro is $1,500 for 29 million credits (about $0.26 per 1,000 requests) and Nova Pro is $30,000 for 1.1 billion credits (about $0.14).
• What you get: You pass an eBay search URL and get a search_results array with item ID, title, seller feedback, condition, price, shipping and an items-sold count.
• Watch out: The page does not state how many results a request returns, and items-sold is a count on an active listing, not a sold-price history. Monthly plan.

5. Bright Data

• Free: Its eBay scraper page lists 5,000 free records a month, no card.
• Paid: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, or $499 a month including 384,000 records with extra records at $1.30 per 1,000. It says you pay only for success.
• Watch out: The unit is a record, defined on the page as “one extracted item,” a row. A search page with many listings is many records, so its price per page can be far above its price per record.

6. Oxylabs, Apify and Zyte

• Oxylabs: The eBay page offers a free trial of up to 2K results with no card, a $5 welcome credit and plans from $30 a month. Its rate table lists generic Web Scraper API prices, and no row is named for eBay, so we could not price an eBay result.
• Apify: The automation-lab eBay actor bills $0.00345 per product on the Free plan and less on paid tiers, plus a $0.001 start fee per run. Apify's Free plan includes $5 of usage a month. The actor covers eight marketplaces and does not support sold listings. Other actors will differ.
• Zyte: The pricing page gives $5 free credit for 30 days and generic per-response rates from $0.13 per 1,000. It does not mention eBay, so you would write the parsing.

What free really costs you

Your time

The official route is free in dollars and costly in setup: an account, keys, an OAuth token flow, and an application for production access if the sandbox is not enough. A hosted JSON API replaces that with one key and one header.

Reliability and support

eBay can retire an API, and it has: the Finding API is gone. The free tier mentions support forums, while Developer Technical Support belongs to the premium tier.

Terms and rules

The licence points above are the real price of free. If your product is a data product, get legal advice before you build on a free key. For any third-party eBay data API, check eBay's own terms and talk to your own counsel.

Cost at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M calls

This is arithmetic from the published rates above, per month, for one call each. We ignored free allowances, tax and extras. Where a vendor sells plans, we used the cheapest plan that covers the volume. Billing units differ, so read the notes under the table.

How to read it

• The Serpent tier rows assume the single qualifying deposit for that tier.
• Plan vendors (Scrapingdog, SerpApi, SearchApi) cost the same whether you use all the quota or not, which is why they look expensive at 1,000 calls. Scrapingdog's rows use Lite, Standard and Premium, because Pro covers 600,000 requests, not a million.
• Bright Data bills per record, so a page of listings costs many units. Its row is a floor for one record per call. The $499 figure is $499 plus 616,000 records at $1.30 per 1,000.
• SerpApi and SearchApi state no eBay credit cost, so we assumed one per call. Oxylabs, Apify and Zyte are left out because we could not price an eBay call on the same unit.
• One call is not one row. SerpApi and SearchApi document 60 to 240 results per page, and Serpent's docs state no page size.

A worked example

Say you track 500 search terms and check each four times a day for 30 days. That is 60,000 calls. On eBay's free tier it is 2,000 a day, inside the cap, if you have production access. On Serpent Default it is $24. On Scrapingdog you would need the $90 Standard plan, because Lite covers only 40,000 requests. This is arithmetic, not a measurement.

Volume also meets rate limits. Serpent Default allows 10,000 calls a day, so 1,000,000 a month needs the Growth band (50,000 a day) or $500 in total deposits (100,000 a day).

How to choose

• You want active listings at small volume and can handle OAuth and paperwork: start with eBay's free tier. Test production access first.
• You need sold prices: there is no open official route and vendors have lost their sold filters. Verify any claim with a live sample.
• You want a quick start, many marketplaces and a low per-call cost: Serpent. One key covers ten marketplaces and six endpoints, and the first deposit is $10.
• You already pay for a monthly plan at high volume: compare Scrapingdog's larger plans, which work out at or below Serpent's Scale rate per request.
• You buy rows, not pages: Bright Data's record pricing suits bulk exports. Work out cost per useful listing first, as our price-per-record guide does.

For a wider vendor comparison, see our best eBay scraping API guide. To track prices across stores, read our ecommerce price intelligence guide and price monitoring guide.

Quick start and migration

A call is a single GET request with your key in one header. These calls come from the API docs:

curl -H 'X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
  'https://apiserpent.com/api/ebay/search?q=vintage%20camera&marketplace_id=EBAY_US&page=1'

curl -H 'X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
  'https://apiserpent.com/api/ebay/item?item_id=335678901234&include_description=1'

And the search call in Python, reading the price from each listing. A price can be null, so guard it:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/ebay/search",
    params={"q": "vintage camera", "marketplace_id": "EBAY_GB", "locale": "en-GB",
            "condition": "used", "sort": "price_asc", "page": 1},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
resp.raise_for_status()
for row in resp.json().get("results", []):
    price = row["price"] or {}
    print(row["position"], price.get("value"), price.get("currency"), row["title"])

Run it once in the playground first if you would rather see the JSON before writing code. For several pages at once, POST to /api/ebay/search/async with pages, then poll the job.

What to change when you move from the official API

• Authentication: The OAuth token flow becomes a single X-API-Key header.
• Filters: Keyword becomes q. Condition, price range and sort become condition, min_price, max_price and sort. The marketplace is marketplace_id, such as EBAY_DE.
• Item detail: Use /api/ebay/item with the numeric listing ID (9 to 20 digits). Add include_description=1 only when you need the full description, because it costs more.

Limits and unknowns

• We did not test anything. Every competitor figure is from its published page on 2026-10-23. Prices and allowances change, so treat the numbers as dated.
• Marketplace Insights. Its page body loads by script, so we could not read it directly. The limited-release wording comes from eBay's docs as shown in search results.
• Browse production access and the growth check. We found no fee, timeline or approval rate, and could not confirm that a new key works in production without approval.
• Serpent free calls on eBay. Our eBay page and docs say core direct calls can spend the 10 free calls. Try one in the playground before relying on it.
• Not checked. We could not verify AnyAPI's eBay pricing on its own site. The list is not exhaustive.

FAQ

Is there a free eBay API?

Yes. eBay's developer program is free to join, and eBay's pages say new accounts get a free access tier of 5,000 API calls a day with no time limit. The Browse API searches active listings. It does not return sold items, and eBay says production use of many Buy APIs needs partner approval. For bigger volumes you apply for higher limits through the Application Growth Check.

How do I get an eBay API key?

Register for a free eBay Developers Program account and accept the API License Agreement. Then create an application keyset, which holds a client ID and a secret, with separate keysets for the sandbox and production. Calls use OAuth tokens built from those keys. With a Serpent key you send one X-API-Key header instead, with no eBay approval step.

What is the eBay Browse API call limit?

eBay's call-limits page lists 5,000 calls a day for the Browse API, with getItems counted separately at 5,000 a day. That is about 150,000 calls in a 30-day month. eBay says default limits suit individuals and smaller businesses, and higher limits come after completing the Application Growth Check. We found no fee or timeline for that check.

Can I get eBay sold items from an API?

Not from a free one. eBay Developer Support says the Browse API returns only active items, the Finding API was decommissioned on February 5, 2025, and eBay's sold-data API, Marketplace Insights, is a restricted release for approved developers. SearchApi says eBay has required sign-in for sold and completed listings since July 23, 2026, and SerpApi has dropped its sold filters. Serpent returns active listings only.

What is the cheapest eBay API alternative?

Among the published rates we read on 2026-10-23, Serpent's Default rate of $0.40 per 1,000 calls is below every vendor's entry rate, and it falls to $0.28 on Scale. Scrapingdog's Pro and Premium plans work out to about $0.33 and $0.29 per 1,000 requests at full use, and its largest plan, Nova Pro, to about $0.14, so Serpent is not the lowest at every level. Bright Data bills per record, so compare cost per useful listing.

Is there a free eBay scraper API or free trial?

Several paid eBay data APIs have a free start. SerpApi gives 250 searches a month, SearchApi 100 requests, Scrapingdog 100 credits, Bright Data 5,000 records a month and Oxylabs a trial of up to 2K results. Serpent gives 10 free calls on sign-up plus one free demo run a day. All are small, so they suit testing, not production.

Sources read on 2026-10-23

• eBay Developers Program: Marketplace Insights overview (free access tier panel)
• eBay: API call limits and Application Growth Check
• eBay: Buy APIs requirements
• eBay: Browse API overview
• eBay: Get started with eBay APIs
• eBay: API License Agreement
• eBay community: sold listings with the Browse API
• eBay community: findCompletedItems and the Finding API
• SerpApi: pricing
• SerpApi: eBay Search API
• SearchApi: pricing
• SearchApi: eBay Search API docs
• Scrapingdog: pricing
• Scrapingdog: eBay search API documentation
• Bright Data: eBay scraper
• Oxylabs: eBay scraper
• Apify: automation-lab eBay actor
• Apify: platform pricing
• Zyte: pricing

Related reading on Serpent: free Amazon product API, free Google Shopping API, SERP APIs with no minimum and a free tier.