APIs-made-in-Iran: a price and access table for Iranian web APIs

A catalogue, not a comparison, and the README says so up front

The title of this repository is the whole pitch: a list of APIs from Iran. Its distinguishing feature against similar collections is stated in the introduction, which says the APIs listed here are not necessarily open source, and that this list differs from three others it links by name, including awesome-persian and made-in-iran.

That difference claim is worth taking seriously because the adjacent projects do exist and do overlap. The Iranian developer ecosystem has several link collections of Persian-language web services, and a reader who has found one has often found two or three. What distinguishes this one is the table structure: every entry is a row with four columns, price status, access status, a link, and a one-line subject description.

The repository itself is minimal. The file tree holds `.github/`, `.gitignore`, `AGENTS.md`, `CONTRIBUTING.md`, `LICENSE` and `README.md`, and nothing else. There is no code, no releases, and no static site. The MIT licence covers the list itself, which is worth separating from the question of what a reader may do with the APIs it points at.

The README is written in Persian, with the category headings and descriptions likewise in Persian. There is no English translation in the tree. For a reader who does not read Persian, that makes the table structure the accessible part and the subject descriptions the inaccessible part, which is a real limit on how much of the list's information is usable.

The four-column table and what a row actually tells you

Every category repeats the same table shape. Price status comes first, then reachability, then a link, then a subject line. Reading the banking and online payment category gives a clear picture of what a row contains.

Three payment gateways are marked as reachable over the open internet: Zarinpal, NextPay and Payping, all carrying a combined free and paid price status. Four bank internet payment gateways are marked as reachable only inside the Iranian network: the national bank gateway operated by Sedad, the housing bank gateway operated by Fanava Card, the Pasargad electronic payment gateway, and the entrepreneur bank gateway through Iran Kish. IDPay, a personal payment gateway and virtual card reader service, is also marked Iran-only and as paid.

So the reachability column is doing real work rather than decorating the table. A developer building an Iranian e-commerce flow learns from it that the bank-operated gateways are not options from outside the country, while the three PSP gateways on the open internet are. That is a distinction the documentation for each individual gateway may not make plainly, and it is the kind of thing this list exists to surface.

The category also carries two Cafe Bazaar entries, a purchase status check on published apps and subscriptions, and in-app payment support for mobile apps published on that store. Both are marked paid. Seeing a domestic app store's developer API listed alongside bank gateways is a reasonable signal about how much of the Iranian software economy runs through a single storefront.

Pricing uses four states, not two

The pricing legend defines four markers rather than the usual free and paid pair. A free marker means the service is entirely free. A money bag marker means it is entirely not free. The two together mean free and non-free options both exist. A question mark means the pricing status is not known.

That fourth state matters more than it looks. A directory that only distinguished free from paid would force an entry to guess, and a guess in a pricing column is exactly the kind of thing a developer acts on. Marking an unknown as unknown is a small piece of catalogue discipline that a lot of link lists skip.

The question mark does appear in practice. In the category for entries that still need a classification, three services carry it: a mobile phone top-up API, the Pod services from Fanap Soft, and an online inquiry system. The Pod documentation link is additionally annotated in the source with a markdown link check disable comment, which tells you the maintainer knows that URL is problematic and chose to keep it visible rather than remove the row.

One category is deliberately absent, and the README explains why in the contribution section. SMS providers are excluded, because there are so many of them that the category would dominate the list, and an entry is only added if the provider offers something genuinely different over SMS rather than just another SMS gateway. That is a good editorial rule: it keeps a high-volume, low-variety category from swamping the genuinely distinct services.

Sixteen categories, from dictionaries to cryptocurrency exchanges

The category index is listed near the top of the README and covers sixteen groupings. Beyond the payment section there is a category for entries that still need a classification, one for communications and marketing, one for text, speech and OCR processing, one for messengers, one for calendar and religious times, one for development, one for government, one for transport and travel, one for cloud services with web hosting and networking, one for media and digital content, one for cryptocurrency and exchange, one for online shops, one for prices, one for finance, and one for maps.

The breadth is the interesting part, because it shows how much of a modern web product can be assembled from Iranian providers. The entries needing classification alone touch several unrelated domains: an API for searching and booking in-person and online doctor appointments, a Persian dictionary lookup service across multiple dictionaries, mobile phone top-up, an online inquiry system, virtual phone numbers, utility bill inquiries covering water, electricity and gas, category-based news retrieval with search, classified listings, a business automation API for creating correspondence and documents, and an AI-based search and discovery platform.

Communications and marketing has its own coherent set: an online chat and customer engagement platform, a survey and quiz creation service, a voice message service, an email marketing service, and a push notification service. Five services that cover the whole outbound communication stack, which is more than most link lists of this kind assemble in one category.

The access-status warning is the most important line in the README

Directly above the reachability legend, the README carries a warning callout. It states that the access status updates relate to the period before the nationwide internet shutdown in Iran began, and that they were recorded according to whether the service was reachable from GitHub's servers.

Both halves of that sentence limit how far the column can be trusted. The first says the data has an expiry date tied to a specific event rather than to a maintenance schedule. The second says the observation point was outside Iran, on GitHub infrastructure, which is precisely the vantage point that cannot see an intranet-only service, and precisely the vantage point best placed to see a globally reachable one.

That makes the column a historical snapshot with a stated methodology, which is more than most lists of this kind offer. It also means the Iran-only marks should be read as what was true at the time from outside, not as a guarantee about today. A service marked Iran-access-only might since have opened up; one marked globally reachable might since have been blocked.

A reader planning an integration from outside Iran should therefore treat the reachability column as a starting hypothesis and check the provider's own documentation. The repository gives you the list of candidates and a first filter. It does not, and does not claim to, tell you what works today.

A disclaimer that assigns all risk to the API providers

The repository includes a section titled disclaimer, and its content is unusually direct for a link list. It says that all responsibilities relating to the listed APIs, regarding legal compliance, support, intellectual property rights, legal matters and any other liability, rest solely with the API provider. It adds that the wording in each description is based on the provider's own statements or claims, and that contributors to the list take no responsibility for the accuracy, functioning or security of the APIs listed.

Read as a document, this is the project stating plainly what it is: a set of pointers maintained by contributors, with no verification layer between the list and the provider. No response time is measured, no endpoint is called, no availability is monitored. The descriptions are what the providers say about themselves, and the list says so.

For a catalogue of third-party services, that is the correct position to take, and stating it plainly is better than leaving a reader to infer it. The practical consequence is that the list answers one question well, which is what exists, and answers the question of whether to depend on it poorly, which requires reading each provider's own documentation and terms.

There is also a funding section, which asks readers to star the repository or donate through the Sponsor button or a linked payment page, and asks donors to mention the project in the donation description. The repository's last push was on 2026-08-18 and it publishes no GitHub releases, so there is no changelog to check when an entry was last confirmed.

Editorial conclusion

This list is most useful to a developer who already knows the shape of what they need: a Persian dictionary, a utility bill lookup, a push notification channel, or an Iranian payment gateway. It is less useful as a discovery tool, because the entries are provider claims rather than evaluations, and nothing in the repository rates a service or records a response time. The two columns that carry real information are price status and reachability, and one of them is explicitly out of date: the README warns that access status was last verified before the nationwide internet shutdown in Iran, and only from GitHub's servers, so the Iran-access-only marks are a historical snapshot rather than a live fact. Treat the README's linked payment gateway docs as the authority on whether a bank integration is workable from outside the country, and read the disclaimer section before building anything on the list.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Hameds/APIs-made-in-Iran on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README