arcsecond.io vs GBIF

Arcsecond.io is the cloud API behind Arcsecond.local, a multi-user platform observatories run to manage telescopes, night logs, and data packages, but it still exposes the project's original public astronomy-lookup endpoints for object coordinates and exoplanets. Those endpoints are keyless and return live-synced records — /exoplanets/ pulls current rows from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Paid tiers apply only to running a private observatory instance; the public data-lookup endpoints stay free.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is a keyless REST API for searching species, occurrence, and dataset records aggregated from natural history collections, herbaria, and citizen-science platforms worldwide — its occurrence index alone reports a live count past 3.9 billion records. It's operated by an intergovernmental nonprofit funded by member governments, so querying the API is free; registration is only needed to publish new datasets, not to read existing ones.