Is the Pinterest API free? Prices, limits and approval (2026)

November 8, 2026

Short answer

Yes, Pinterest's docs list no fee for API v5, but access is gated. You need a business account and an approved app; Trial access allows 1,000 requests a day per app, and Standard access, which needs a video of your OAuth flow, moves to per-minute limits such as 1,000 org_read calls per user per app. The API mostly reads your own accounts and accounts that authorize you, not other people's public pins.

Pinterest does not charge for its API. The cost is approval time and scope: the API is built for managing your own pins, boards and ads, and Pinterest's rules forbid storing most of what it returns. Here is the access path, the limits and what you can and cannot read, from Pinterest's developer pages today. For a tour of endpoints, see Pinterest API options; this post is about price and access.

Access tiers at a glance

	Trial access	Standard access
Price	No fee listed	No fee listed
How you get it	Business account, accept developer terms, submit the Connect app form	Trial approval, then upload a video of your app's OAuth flow and an API call
Overall limit	1,000 requests a day for all calls	100 requests a second per user per app
org_read (pins, boards)	1,000 a day	1,000 a minute per user per app
trends_read	1,000 a day	60 a minute
org_analytics	1,000 a day	60 a minute
Pins and boards you create	Visible only to you, as Sandbox items	Normal, public

Numbers are from Pinterest's rate limits page, which says limits can change without notice.

The approval steps

Create or log in to a Pinterest business account and verify the email.
Open My apps, accept the Developer Terms, and fill in the Connect app form. The app name cannot contain "Pinterest".
Wait for the Trial review email. Trial lets you make 24-hour test tokens and use the Sandbox.
For Standard, record a video of a user going through OAuth and your app making a call. Pinterest's access tiers page says you need the video even if you are the only user, and Postman or terminal recordings are fine.
Click Upgrade on the app card, confirm your use case and privacy policy link, and submit.

Common reasons for denial, per Pinterest: a missing or broken privacy policy, an unclear description, a demo without the auth flow, or collecting login credentials or session cookies instead of OAuth.

What the API reads, and what it does not

Pinterest's own OpenAPI spec (pinterest/api-description) is clear about scope:

Get Pin returns a pin owned by the token's account, or on a group board shared with it.
Search pins and search boards search the token user's own pins and boards.
Search partner pins returns the top 10 pins for a term, but it is in beta and not available to all apps.
Trends endpoints return trending keywords by region, featured topics and growing shopping categories. These are the most useful reads that do not depend on whose account you hold.
Pin analytics cover your own pins and accounts that authorized you.

So a competitor's boards, their pin saves, or a public keyword search across all of Pinterest are not things the official API gives a new app.

The rules that cost the most

Pinterest's developer guidelines are strict:

Apart from campaign analytics for your account or an account that granted you access, you may not store information from the API. Call it again each time.
No platform insights, benchmarking or competitor research features without written authorization from Pinterest.
No scraping or automated data extraction unless Pinterest expressly permits it.
No training or improving AI or machine learning models with Pinterest materials.
No sharing or selling API data to third parties.

The no-storage rule matters for budgeting. A dashboard that redraws 200 pins every hour makes 4,800 calls a day, which is well over the Trial limit of 1,000 and must wait for Standard.

Which one fits you

You manage your own or your clients' accounts: the official API, Standard access. It is free and authoritative.
You want trend keywords: the official Trends endpoints at 60 calls a minute.
You only need to save images from a few boards: free tools such as gallery-dl or yt-dlp, which both list Pinterest support. They download files, and they sit under the same no-scraping rule above.
You research public pins and boards you do not own: a paid data API, or the methods in best Pinterest scrapers.

Doing it with ScrapeIO

ScrapeIO reads public Pinterest data without an app review: the pinterest pin API, pinterest board API, pinterest search API, pinterest user boards API and pinterest topic API, at 1 credit a call. A daily check of 200 pins is 6,000 calls a month, about $11 at the Starter rate. Agents can use the Pinterest MCP server. For analytics ideas, see Pinterest analytics tools.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

100 free credits, no card. Credits never expire.

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