About Go REST
Free public REST API for testing and prototyping. What it is, why it exists, and how it stays free.
What it is
Go REST is a free, public REST API for testing and prototyping. It serves realistic fake data for users, posts, comments, and todos (the four most common shapes in any web application) so frontend developers, mobile developers, and learners can build against a real, live HTTP API without standing up a backend.
Why it exists
Most tutorials assume you already have an API. Most production apps spend the first month building one. The gap between those two is where Go REST sits. If you are learning fetch / requests / OkHttp / curl, building a portfolio piece, prototyping a UI for a stakeholder, or testing how your client code handles 401s and 429s, you need an API that is real enough to behave like real APIs (bearer tokens, rate limits, validation errors, status headers) but free, anonymous, and always available. That is what we provide.
Who runs it
Go REST is built and operated by Silicon Circuits. The whole stack runs on a homelab K3s cluster: a handful of Raspberry Pi nodes on a shelf at home, tied together by Traefik on the edge with Rails and Postgres doing the actual work. A developer's dream cluster put to work for the wider community.
Track record
Online since 2016. Hundreds of millions of requests served. No paid tier, no enterprise SKU, no acquisition pivot. Maintained as a personal infrastructure project rather than a venture-backed company, which means operational decisions consistently favour stability over feature velocity. If something breaks at 2am, somebody on the team is on the same Wi-Fi as the server.
Honest about uptime
Hosting at home is the magic, and it is also the catch. A long power cut, an ISP rerouting, a misbehaving switch, a stray cable kicked by the cat: these are infrastructure realities the cluster cannot route around. Most outages are short (minutes, not hours) and tend to happen at India night-time when usage is low, but they happen. If you are building something that absolutely cannot tolerate any downtime, do not point production traffic at a free homelab API. Use Go REST for what it is genuinely good for: testing, learning, prototyping, demos, and that interview project due tomorrow morning.
How it stays free
There is no paid tier. Sign-in is optional and only needed when you want a higher rate-limit budget or write access scoped to your own data. We do not sell or share user data with third parties beyond what is required for hosting and OAuth sign-in.
What we promise
Predictable shapes. Real HTTP status codes. Honest error messages. Daily reseed so the data stays fresh. No surprise pricing. No retention games. If you build a tutorial or a course around the endpoints, the endpoints will still work tomorrow. If we ever need to deprecate something, we publish a notice on the home page weeks before the change.
What we ask
Use it for testing, learning, and prototyping, not as a production data store. The data you create is shared infrastructure and can be reset at any time. Stay inside the rate limit (or raise it sensibly per token if you have a real need). If you find a bug, report it via the contact form so we can fix it for everyone.