Pexels pauses new API key issuance with no timeline, leaving developers stuck

Pexels halts new API key issuance

Since 30 September 2026, the Pexels API page has greeted visitors with a single sentence: "New API key issuance is currently paused." According to a post on dev.to by Marouane Tijani, the notice replaced the key request form outright — there is no signup form in its place, no explanation and no date for a return. The author reports that the related help-center articles were edited on 30 September between 19:04 and 19:15 UTC, and that the pause was still in place on 17 October.

A second notice on the same pages states that API rate limit increases are paused too. Keys issued before the change keep working, but they are frozen at the default limits of 200 requests per hour and 20,000 per month. In practice this splits Pexels' developer base in two: existing integrations continue to run but cannot scale, while anything new — a fresh project, a teammate who needs a key of their own, or an open-source repository whose setup instructions tell contributors to supply a PEXELS_API_KEY environment variable — has no way to start.

Developers are already rerouting

Tijani, who tallied the fallout while writing the post, counts roughly 20 public GitHub issues and pull requests in the first two weeks of October that cite the pause as the reason for a change. About half of those projects switched to Pixabay, which is not a drop-in replacement: it offers a different catalogue, and its terms oblige clients to download images and host them themselves rather than link directly, and to cache API responses for 24 hours.

Competitors are moving in

The dev.to post doubles as a migration guide to Pexafy, and its author discloses up front that he builds the product. Pexafy is presented as a search API that indexes millions of Pexels photos alongside Unsplash, Pixabay and other free-to-use libraries, with a source filter that restricts results to Pexels imagery only, so products whose visual identity depends on that catalogue can keep it.

Among the other claims made for the service: a free tier that hands out keys immediately, with no credit card or use-case review; search driven by full descriptive sentences rather than keyword tags, in more than 100 languages; attribution metadata attached to every result; published pricing with self-service upgrades; and a hosted MCP server that lets AI coding agents such as Claude or Cursor search and credit photos on their own.

The guide also ships practical migration code. One server-side adapter rewrites Pexafy responses into the Pexels JSON shape — the familiar photos[].src.large and photographer fields — so existing front-end code needs no changes. A second pattern keeps an existing Pexels key as the primary provider and falls back to the alternative only when Pexels answers with a 429 rate-limit error, a sensible hedge given that existing keys still work but cannot be raised above the default quota.

These are vendor claims from a single promotional source rather than an independent review, and the specific figures — such as the count of GitHub issues — come from the author's own survey. But the shape of the response, a rival turning a competitor's silence into a ten-minute migration pitch, is itself a measure of how exposed the Pexels developer ecosystem turned out to be.

Why it matters

The Pexels API became a default building block for tutorials, side projects and production apps that needed free, legally clear photography with simple attribution. A silent, open-ended pause — one line of text, no incident report, no timeline — removes the onboarding path entirely while capping everyone else at default limits. It is a textbook reminder that even a free and generous API is a single point of failure controlled by one company's decisions: projects that hard-coded Pexels' key flow or response shape now face rework they never budgeted for. The speed of the rerouting, with maintainers landing provider swaps within two weeks, shows both the resilience of the open-source ecosystem and how little loyalty an unexplained outage buys.