chucknorris.io vs TasteDive

chucknorris.io is a free, keyless JSON API serving hand-curated Chuck Norris jokes, either fully random or filtered across 16 categories (career, dev, movie, political, sport, and more). It also supports free-text search over the joke corpus and returns each joke with a permalink and an icon-URL field for quick embedding. There's no rate limit, no signup, and no paid tier — it's run as a hobby project on Heroku behind Cloudflare.

TasteDive's recommendation API takes one or more seed items — movies, music, shows, books, games, people, places, or brands, optionally typed to disambiguate titles like "movie:Chaplin" — and returns similar items scored by TasteDive's own recommendation engine, with an optional verbose mode adding descriptions and YouTube links. It requires a free access key (`k` parameter) issued on request, capped at 300 requests per hour, and there's no paid tier beyond that shared rate limit. Responses are plain JSON with no CORS headers, so browser-side calls need a server-side proxy.