GBIF vs Newton

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.

Newton is a keyless calculator API deployed as a Vercel serverless function: the operation (simplify, factor, derive, integrate, and more) and expression are both encoded directly in the URL path, and it answers with a small JSON object containing the result. It's a solo open-source project (aunyks/newton-api) rather than a commercial service, so there's no pricing tier or rate limit to opt into.