Hacker News API

Developers & tech · v1.1.0 · hacker_news

$0.0003 / story

$0.24 / 1K · pay per delivered story

A Hacker News API that answers two questions from one endpoint: what is on the front page right now, and what HN has ever posted about a term. Leave the query empty for the live front page, or search the full archive by relevance or by date — either way you get one row per story with points, author, comment count, the outbound link and the discussion permalink.

By Aldo Morese, founder of QuanticData · Published Aug 21, 2026 · Updated Sep 3, 2026

Run in dashboard See the request

$0.0003 per delivered story · $2 free every month · Failed runs never billed

What it does

What a Hacker News API does

Hacker News publishes a Firebase feed of raw item ids, which means reconstructing a front page or a search is a fan-out of hundreds of per-item lookups you then have to assemble and rank yourself. This collector reads the official Algolia index that HN itself uses for search, so a front page or a keyword query comes back already ordered and already joined — one call per run, not a tree of them.

What lands is a flat table: title, the outbound url (null when the post is a text submission), points, author, comments and the timestamps, plus the hn_url that points at the discussion. Ask HN and Show HN are selectable as their own types, and self-post text arrives with its tags stripped, so a corpus of Show HN launches or Ask HN threads is a filter setting rather than a scraping project.

Inputs

The whole request. Anything you leave out falls back to the default shown in the catalog.

Input	Type	Required	What it does
`query`	string	no	What to search. Empty = current front page.
`type`	string	no	Story type filter (default: story when searching, front_page otherwise). One of: `story`, `ask_hn`, `show_hn`, `front_page`.
`sort`	string	no	relevance (default when searching) or date (newest first). One of: `relevance`, `date`.
`max_results`	integer	no	How many stories to deliver at most (1–200). You pay only for delivered stories.

Outputs — 14 fields, one row per story

What one story looks like

Every delivered story carries these fields. Nullable means the source did not publish it — the field stays empty instead of being guessed.

Field	Type	What it holds
`rank`	integer	1-based position.
`id`	string	HN item id.
`title`	string	Story title.
`url`	string · nullable	Outbound link (null for text posts).
`points`	integer · nullable	Upvotes.
`author`	string · nullable	Submitter.
`comments`	integer · nullable	Comment count.
`created_at`	string · nullable	Submission time (ISO 8601).
`text`	string · nullable	Self-post text (Ask HN), tags stripped.
`hn_url`	string	Link to the HN discussion.
`tags`	string[]	Index tags (story, show_hn…).
`domain`	string · nullable	Host of the linked page (github.com); null for text posts.
`updated_at`	string · nullable	Last time the story changed in the index (ISO 8601).
`type`	string	story, ask_hn, show_hn, job or poll.

Integration

One POST, typed rows

Base URL https://api.quanticdata.io/v1, Bearer auth, the same key as every other Data API. Endpoint: POST /v1/scraper/collectors/hacker_news/run.

curl -X POST https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/hacker_news/run \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"max_results":30}'

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/hacker_news/run",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {QD_API_KEY}"},
    json={
        "max_results": 30
    },
    timeout=120,
)
for row in r.json()["payload"]["results"]:
    print(row)

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/hacker_news/run",
  {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.QD_API_KEY}`,
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({"max_results":30}),
  },
);
const { payload } = await res.json();
console.table(payload.results);

claude mcp add quanticdata \
  -e QUANTICDATA_API_KEY=qd_live_your_key_here \
  -- npx -y quanticdata-mcp

# then, in the chat:
> run the hacker_news collector with max_results=30

Example response

POST /v1/scraper/collectors/hacker_news/run

$ curl $QD/hacker_news/run \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
    -d '{"max_results": 30}'
{ "status": "done", "count": 30,
  "results": [
    {
      "id": "…",
      "title": "…",
      "url": "…",
      "points": … } ],
  "cost": 0.009 }
# 30 stories × $0.0003 · nothing delivered, nothing charged

Try it

Hacker News stories, running now

Change the input and run it against the live collector — nothing to install, no sign-up.

Run it from your own code, on your own inputs

Same collector, same rows — $2 of free API credit every month, no card.

Get my free API key

Hacker News API: from query, type and sort, QuanticData reads the Hacker News front page and returns one row per story with title, points and author, at $0.0003 per delivered story. — You send query and type; the run goes out through a residential exit and comes back as stories with rank, id and title — 14 fields on every row — and you are billed $0.0003 for each story actually delivered, nothing for a run that delivers none.

$0.0003 / story6,666 stories on the free $2 every month

Semantic inputquery, type, sort — no URL lists

Up to 200stories per run, pagination handled for you

No browserread over HTTP/TLS — cheaper and faster than rendering

Pricing

Hacker News API pricing

$0.0003 per delivered story. A run that delivers nothing costs nothing: blocked pages, challenges and retries are on us, and the $2 monthly allowance covers about 6,666 stories before you spend anything.

$0.0003per delivered story$0.24 per 1,000 delivered stories

6,666 storieson the free allowance$2 every month, no card

Zero rowszero chargeblocks, captchas and retries are on us

−30%on volume tiersthe catalog returns your key's price

Pay as you go

$0/mo

$2 free credit / month
60 requests / min
List unit prices

Starter

$19/mo

$15 free credit / month
300 requests / min
10% off unit prices

Growth

$79/mo

$50 free credit / month
600 requests / min
20% off unit prices

Scale

$299/mo

$250 free credit / month
1,200 requests / min
30% off unit prices

Same wallet, same key and same $2 monthly allowance as every other Data API. Prices are launch pricing read live from the billing config — GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.

What people build with the Hacker News API

Three shapes of work this endpoint was designed around.

Launch and sentiment monitoring

Search your product, a competitor or a topic across the whole archive and get every story with its points and comment count, so a spike in attention is a row with numbers rather than a screenshot someone sent you.

Front-page datasets

Take the live front page on a schedule and you accumulate a time series of what the audience surfaced, ranked, with the outbound link and discussion link on each row.

Show HN and Ask HN mining

Target the Show HN or Ask HN type to build a clean set of launches or questions — title, submitter, self-text and engagement — for trend analysis or lead discovery.

Hacker News API versus rolling your own

The differences that actually cost time when you build this in-house.

	DIY scraper	This collector
Assembly	Fan-out of per-item id lookups	One call, stories already ranked
Coverage	Front page or a hand-rolled index	Front page or the full Algolia archive
Row shape	Item ids to resolve and join	Title, points, author, comments, links

What people search for

Live autocomplete demand around Hacker News stories, pulled with our own Keyword ideas collector.

Hacker News API: the POST to the hacker_news collector, 30 stories delivered and the bill, 30 × $0.0003 = $0.009 in usage.cost_usd; zero stories would cost $0. — The same call you would paste into a terminal: a Bearer key, query, type and sort in the body, and back the envelope every QuanticData endpoint returns — type, message, payload — where count is how many stories arrived and usage.cost_usd is $0.009, which is 30 × $0.0003. A run that delivers nothing costs nothing. The key is good for 60 req/min on the free tier.

Sources and standards

The platform documentation and standards this collector is built against — check any claim on this page against the primary source:

FAQ

Questions we get about the Hacker News API.

Something else? Ask us

Which Hacker News API is this reading?

The official Algolia-powered search index — the same one behind HN's own search box — for both keyword queries and the front page. It is not the Firebase item feed, so you get ranked stories in one response instead of a list of ids to resolve one by one.

Can I search old stories, or only what is live now?

Both. An empty query returns the current front page; a query with sort set to relevance or date searches the entire archive, so you can pull the highest-scoring stories about a term or the most recent ones.

Do I get the comments themselves?

You get the comment count per story and the hn_url that links to the discussion, plus self-post text for Ask HN threads. The endpoint is story-level; it does not return the individual comment tree.

Is there a free Hacker News API?

Every account gets $2 of credit every month with no card, which is about 6,666 delivered stories on this endpoint at $0.0003 each. It renews monthly, and a run that delivers nothing is never billed — so a failed or blocked attempt does not eat the allowance.

How much does one run cost?

Multiply the rows you actually receive by $0.0003. A run capped at 200 stories — the maximum for this collector — costs $0.06 if every row comes back, and less when the source has fewer. Volume tiers take up to 30% off, and GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.

Run the Hacker News API now

$2 of free credit every month, no card. Your key returns its own prices from GET /v1/scraper/collectors.

Run in dashboard

Illustration: three coloured zones of the page that is read (Hacker News front page) turn into clean JSON with the fields title, points and author; 14 fields on every row.