A free football API plan for students, researchers and builders on a budget
Football data shouldn't be gated by what you earn.
$5 a month is cheap in London and a real decision in Lagos. If you are a student, a researcher, early in your career — or if that $5 is a real decision for you — you can have more than the free plan gives, switched on in a minute. No card, no catch.
Who it is for
Any one of these is enough. We take your word for it.
- ✓ Students, at any level
- ✓ Academic or non-profit research — a thesis, a paper, a course, a public dataset
- ✓ Developers in the first years of their career
- ✓ Anyone for whom US$5 a month is money that matters — no income figure, no proof
What you get
Everything on the free plan, plus room to build a real project around one country's football.
- ✓ The top-5 leagues plus one country pack of your choice — its top flight and, where we price it, the second division
- ✓ Every Bet365 odds market — opening, closing and in-play
- ✓ 300 requests an hour (up to 20 a minute), five times the free allowance
- ✓ The last 12 months of results and odds — a full season to build on
- ✓ 12 months at a time — renew with one click when the term is ending
- ✓ The whole price: a linked Football data by 5DollarFootballAPI credit wherever the data is shown publicly — private and internal use needs none
Switch it on
Pick the line that describes you and the country you are building for. That is the whole application — it is on the moment you press the button, and stays on for 12 months. Renewal is the same form in the last 30 days of a term.
Community Access is the free plan with a wider door, not a discount on Pro. Batch odds on fixture lists and the full 130+ league list stay with the $5 plan — that is the plan that keeps this one free.
Why we do this
Useful football data is too often locked behind plans costing tens or hundreds of dollars a month. Those prices do not filter for better ideas — they filter for better-funded teams, leaving out students, independent researchers, and builders working on leagues the market already overlooks.
We believe a bigger budget should buy scale, not the right to participate. Community Access provides the same data quality as our paid plans and draws the line where pricing should: at coverage and throughput.
That is what 5DollarFootballAPI is about: making useful football data affordable enough for more people to build with it.
Community Access questions
Yes. Community Access is a second $0 plan beside Free: the same Bet365 odds markets, the top-5 leagues plus one country pack of your choice, the last 12 months of history and 300 requests / hour. It runs for 12 months at a time and renews with one click. No card is asked for.
Students at any level, academic or non-profit researchers, developers in the first years of their career, and anyone for whom US$5 a month is money that matters. Any one of those is enough — pick the line that describes you and it is on. We take your word for it: there is no income figure to enter and nothing to upload.
Three things: one country pack of your choice on top of the top-5 leagues, 300 requests / hour instead of 60 requests / hour (both capped at 20 a minute), and the last 12 months of results and odds instead of the last 3. The odds markets are the same on both.
Odds for a whole fixture list in one call (include=odds) and the full list of 130+ competitions. Those are the two things that turn evaluating the data into running on it, and Pro at $5 a month is the plan that keeps Community free.
Compare every planYes. Community Access is about who you are, not what you build: use the data in commercial websites, apps, models and internal tools, display it to your end users and cache responses. If the data appears in a public-facing product (website, app, bot or published dataset), include “Football data by 5DollarFootballAPI” with a link to the site; private and internal use does not need attribution. The one hard line, on every plan, is reselling or redistributing the raw data as a competing feed.
The full usage terms, in plain EnglishRenewal opens in the last 30 days of a term — the same form, one click, and you can keep your country pack or pick another. If you let it lapse, the account simply returns to Free; nothing is deleted, and Community Access can be switched on again later.
Start with a free key
Sign up, make your first call, and switch Community on whenever you are ready.