Yelp API pricing: Fusion API key, reviews endpoint and rate limits
The Yelp Fusion API is now documented as the Yelp Places API, and it is a paid product with no free tier. Yelp's pricing page lists Base at $229 a month, Enhanced at $299 and Premium at $643, with per-call overages on the top two. The part that catches most teams out is not the price: the reviews endpoint returns three review excerpts of roughly 160 characters each, you cannot choose which three, and you may only cache the data for 24 hours. Below is the full plan table, the endpoint map, the documented limits and an honest answer to whether you need this API at all.
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Most people searching for a reviews API just want reviews on their own pages. That is a script tag. Note that our widget covers Google, G2, Trustpilot and direct reviews, and Yelp is on the roadmap rather than live.
The question behind most Yelp API searches
How much does the Yelp API cost?
Yelp prices the Places API as a monthly subscription with a per-call overage on the upper tiers. The plans differ by how many business attributes they expose and, critically, by whether you get review excerpts and photos at all.
| Plan | Published price | Overage per 1,000 calls | Review excerpts | Photos |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trial | $0 for 30 days | Not applicable | Evaluation only | Evaluation only |
| Base | $229 per month | Not published | None | None |
| Enhanced | $299 per month | $6.57 | Up to 3 | Up to 3 |
| Premium | $643 per month | $14.13 | Up to 7 | Up to 12 |
Read at Yelp's data licensing pricing page on 29 August 2026, quoted as published. The $229 entry point matches the figure TechCrunch reported when Yelp first shared its pricing deck with developers in 2024. Yelp states that above 150,000 monthly API calls you need to contact its sales team through the Enterprise form.
The cheapest plan has no reviews at all
Base carries 15 business attributes and Yelp documents it plainly as no access to review excerpts and no access to photos. If reviews are the reason you came, your real entry price is the $299 Enhanced plan, not the $229 headline.
There is no free tier any more
Developers who used Fusion years ago remember a generous free daily allowance. It is gone. What is left is a 30 day trial of up to 5,000 calls that Yelp's FAQ marks in capitals as strictly for evaluation and not for commercial deployment.
Overage is charged per 1,000 calls
Enhanced adds $6.57 and Premium $14.13 for each additional 1,000 calls. Because you may only cache for 24 hours, a busy page that fetches live is billing against that meter every day rather than once.
The constraint nobody mentions until you have paid
What the Yelp reviews endpoint actually returns
This is the single most important thing to understand before you scope a Yelp integration, and it is the reason a lot of Yelp projects get abandoned after the first sprint.
Three excerpts of about 160 characters
Yelp's FAQ describes the reviews response as three review excerpts from an individual business of approximately 160 characters each. Not three reviews. Three truncated snippets. A customer who wrote four thoughtful paragraphs about your restaurant arrives in your application as a sentence and a half that stops mid-word. Premium raises the ceiling to seven excerpts, but they are still excerpts.
You do not choose which ones
Yelp selects the returned excerpts itself, weighing recency, voting and quality signals. There is no parameter that says give me the five star ones. If a lukewarm three star review is currently one of the three Yelp considers most relevant, that is what renders on your marketing page, and you have no control over it beyond waiting.
Twenty-four hours of caching, and that is the ceiling
Yelp permits caching Places API content for a maximum of 24 hours. Business IDs are the one exception and may be stored indefinitely. Practically, this rules out the warehouse pattern: you cannot legitimately build a permanent local table of Yelp reviews to trend over quarters, because you are required to let the content expire inside a rolling day.
Display rules sit on top of all of it
Yelp publishes separate display requirements and brand guidelines governing how its stars, logo and attribution must appear wherever you render the data. Budget design time for it. A compliant Yelp review block looks like Yelp, by design, which is a real constraint if you were planning to match it to your own brand.
| Endpoint | Plan needed | What it returns |
|---|---|---|
| GET /v3/businesses/search | Base | Business search by location, term and category. The workhorse endpoint and the one most quota is spent on. |
| GET /v3/businesses/{id} | Base | Full business detail. How many attributes come back depends on your plan: 15 on Base, 23 on Enhanced, 66 on Premium. |
| GET /v3/businesses/{id}/reviews | Enhanced | Up to three review excerpts of roughly 160 characters, with rating, timestamp and reviewer. Seven on Premium. |
| Review Highlights | Premium | Yelp's extracted themes across a business's reviews. Explicitly unavailable on Enhanced and Base. |
| GET /v3/autocomplete | Base | Type-ahead suggestions for businesses, categories and terms. Cheap to call and easy to over-call from a search box. |
Endpoint paths still use the api.yelp.com/v3 prefix from the Fusion era, which is why the Fusion and Places names are used interchangeably in tutorials. Plan requirements read from Yelp's plan details page, August 2026.
Getting access
How to get a Yelp API key
The mechanics are simple. The thing that trips people up is that a key without a selected plan does not serve data, so the old habit of grabbing a key to experiment first no longer works.
1
Create an app
Sign in at yelp.com/developers/v3/manage_app and create an application. This is where the key is issued and where you return to rotate it.
2
Start the trial
Selecting a plan is what activates the key. The trial gives you up to 5,000 calls over 30 days, evaluation only, so do not point production at it.
3
Send it as a Bearer token
Pass the key in the Authorization header as Bearer YOUR_KEY. Yelp does not use a query string key, so a key in a URL is a sign you are reading an outdated tutorial.
4
Read the headers back
Every response carries RateLimit-DailyLimit, RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-ResetTime. Log them from day one and you will never be surprised by a quota wall.
The two HTTP 429s, and why they are not the same problem
Yelp returns 429 for two unrelated reasons and the error code tells you which. TOO_MANY_REQUESTS_PER_SECOND means you are calling too fast in a burst; the fix is throttling and a backoff, and your daily budget is untouched. ACCESS_LIMIT_REACHED, with the message "You've reached the access limit for this client", means the day's allowance is gone; no amount of backoff helps and it clears at midnight UTC.
Teams routinely spend an afternoon adding retry logic to a problem that is actually a spent daily quota. Read the code, not just the status. Yelp also notes that additional calls are granted based on actual user traffic, typically after a product has launched, which means the allowance you start with is not necessarily the one you keep once you can show real usage.
Yelp against the other review APIs
Yelp, Google and Trustpilot review APIs compared
If you are choosing where to invest integration time, the differences are stark. Every one of these platforms limits review access, but they limit it in different directions.
| Yelp Places API | Google Places API | Trustpilot API | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reviews returned | 3 excerpts, 7 on Premium | 5, full text | Up to 100,000, full text |
| Full review text | No, roughly 160 characters | Yes | Yes |
| Entry price for review access | $299 per month | Pay as you go, free monthly credit | $319 per month plus add-on |
| Caching allowed | 24 hours | 30 days for most content | Encouraged, store in your backend |
| Reply to reviews | No | Business Profile API only | Yes, private endpoint |
| Best suited to | Local discovery and business data | Maps and location features | Owning and analyzing your own reviews |
Google and Trustpilot figures are covered in full on our Google Reviews API and Trustpilot API pages. The pattern across all three: these APIs are built to power discovery and business data, not to be a source of testimonial copy for your marketing site.
Yelp is the strictest of the three on review text, and the most generous on business data
It is worth being fair to Yelp here. If your product is a local discovery experience, a restaurant finder, a service marketplace or an internal tool that needs structured data about millions of US businesses, the Places API is genuinely strong: Premium exposes 66 attributes covering hours, categories, price tier, transactions and more. That is the job it is built for and it does it well.
The mismatch appears when a marketing team asks for Yelp reviews on the homepage. For that job you are paying $299 a month to render three truncated sentences you did not choose, refreshed every 24 hours, inside Yelp's brand rules. That is the wrong tool at the wrong price, and no amount of engineering fixes it.
Decide before you build
Do you actually need the Yelp API?
Four common goals, and the honest route to each. Only one of them is a genuine case for paying for API access.
You do not need the API
You want reviews on your website
This is the most common reason people land here and the one the API serves worst. You would pay $299 a month for three 160 character excerpts under Yelp's display rules. A widget renders reviews with no key and no quota. Yelp is not a source our own widget covers yet, so if Yelp specifically is the requirement, a Yelp badge from Yelp itself is the cheaper path.
Yes, the API is the right tool
You are building a local discovery product
Search across US businesses by location and category, with rich structured attributes, is exactly what the Places API is designed for. Budget Premium if you need the full 66 attribute set, and design your caching around the 24 hour rule from the start rather than retrofitting it.
The API fights you
You want to track your own Yelp rating over time
The 24 hour cache limit means you cannot build a permanent archive of the review content, and there is no endpoint that gives you your full review history. Most teams end up logging just the aggregate rating and review count daily, which is legitimate and is usually enough for a trend line.
Not possible
You want to reply to Yelp reviews programmatically
There is no public write endpoint for replies. Responding happens in the Yelp for Business interface. If reply automation across platforms is the goal, Trustpilot is the only major platform of the three that exposes it, through a private OAuth endpoint.
Being straight with you
Where ReviewJet fits, and where it does not
We sell review software, so you should know exactly what we do and do not cover before you weigh anything on this page.
What we do not do
We do not connect to Yelp. It is on the roadmap and it is not live, and we will not list it as though it were. If your requirement is specifically Yelp reviews rendered on your site today, nothing on this page is a pitch for us, and the honest answer is Yelp's own badge and review widgets.
What we do
We collect, monitor and display Google, G2, Trustpilot and direct reviews through one embeddable widget, and we run the request sequences that grow how many reviews you have in the first place. Flat pricing from $24 a month. If your Yelp problem is really a "we do not have enough reviews anywhere" problem, that is the part we solve.
Questions people actually search
Yelp API questions, answered
Keep reading
Related review API and platform pages
Google Reviews API
The five review cap on Places, the Business Profile approval process, and the quota trick that tells you if you are approved.
Trustpilot API
The add-on that sits on a $319 a month floor, the public and private split, and the 100,000 record ceiling.
Best customer review platforms
Where Yelp actually earns its place, and which two or three profiles are worth maintaining for your business.
Reviews aggregator
One feed across Google, G2 and Trustpilot instead of three integrations with three approval processes.
Export reviews to Google Sheets and BI tools
Getting review data into a spreadsheet, Power BI or BigQuery without a native connector.
Trustpilot vs Google reviews
Which platform to put your collection effort behind, and what each one costs you to run properly.
Reviews on your site without a $299 a month API bill
Google, G2, Trustpilot and direct reviews in one widget, with collection sequences that grow the number you have. Flat pricing from $24 a month.
From $24/mo, billed yearly. No per-review fees.