Pexels
Free stock photos and video, free API at 200 req/hour and 20,000/month
Pexels is a free stock library covering both photography and video, under the Pexels License: free for commercial and non-commercial use, modification allowed, attribution appreciated but not required for the media itself. Its API is free with a key from any Pexels account and covers photo search, curated photos, video search, popular videos and collections, rate-limited to 200 requests per hour and 20,000 per month. Unlike Unsplash it carries a real stock video catalogue, which makes it the go-to when a hero section needs footage rather than a still. Total library size is not published.
npm install pexelsPick Pexels over Unsplash when the brief needs video — it is the free library with a real stock footage catalogue and a `/v1/videos/search` endpoint — and treat photos as a second opinion when an Unsplash search comes back thin. Two traps: the API asks you to credit the photographer as 'Photo by X on Pexels' with a link back even though the media licence itself does not require it, and the 200 req/hour ceiling is five times tighter than Unsplash's, so cache aggressively rather than querying per render. The public site 403s a plain curl with a default user agent, so scrape through the API with a key, not the HTML.
Why it is here. The free-video half of the stock problem has almost no credible free-API answer, and Pexels is it.
- free stock video with a search API
- 200 req/hour and 20,000 req/month free
- attribution optional on the licence, requested by the API
- no login needed to download
- no resale of unaltered copies
Verified 2026-08-16. HTTP 200. https://www.pexels.com (WebFetch 200; plain curl returns 403), https://www.pexels.com/license/, https://www.pexels.com/api/, https://www.pexels.com/api/documentation/, https://registry.npmjs.org/pexels (pexels 1.4.0, MIT, published 2022-09-19)
