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📡 We check restful-api.dev (and 50+ other public mock/testing services) with a plain GET every 30 minutes — see the live status page.

restful-api.dev alternative — a mock objects API where your objects actually appear in the list

restful-api.dev deserves real credit before anything else: unlike almost every free fake API, its writes actually persist. POST /objects gives you an id, GET /objects/<id> returns your object, PATCH updates it, DELETE removes it, and CORS is open — no key, no signup. JSONPlaceholder, DummyJSON, and FakeStoreAPI all fake that loop; restful-api.dev does it for real, and it's been quietly reliable for years. Its reserved seed data is a sensible design too: nobody can vandalise the 13 devices every tutorial depends on.

But the moment your tutorial goes past hello-world, you hit walls that are baked into the design. All of this verified hands-on, September 6, 2026:

• NEW (September 7, 2026): anonymous access is capped at 50 requests per 24 hours per IP. Past the cap, every call answers HTTP 405 with {"error":"You’ve reached the daily request limit for our public API (50 requests per 24 hours). Create a free account or sign in…"}. Worse for automation: the cap is per IP, so anything calling from a shared egress IP — Cloudflare Workers, serverless functions, CI runners, corporate NAT — shares one pooled 50-request budget with every other tenant on that IP. Our edge-based status checker has been over the pooled quota continuously since ~02:30 UTC on Sep 7; a laptop on a fresh IP still gets through. A React dev server doing hot-reload refetches burns 50 requests in minutes. (Mockbird: 10,000 requests per project per day, and the cap is per project, not per IP.)
• Your objects never appear in the list. GET /objects always returns the same 13 seed phones — we created an object, got a 200 with an id, fetched it back fine, and the list still showed exactly 13. The single most common tutorial loop — create a thing, then render the updated list — cannot be built on it. Your object exists only at its id URL; lose the 32-character hex id and it's effectively gone.
• Seed objects are read-only. PUT /objects/1 answers {"error":"1 is a reserved id and the data object of it cannot be overridden…"}; DELETE likewise. Update/delete flows can only be demoed on objects you created — which, see above, aren't in the list.
• No filtering, pagination, or sorting keyless. ?limit=2 and ?page=2&limit=5 both returned all 13 objects; ?name=… is ignored. (Their docs describe limit and JWT auth for a signed-in tier.)
• One resource, one shape. Everything is /objects with {id, name, data} — /users answers 401. No second collection, no relations, no custom fields with types.

Mockbird does the same job — free, no signup, writes persist — and the parts restful-api.dev walls off just work: your creates show up in your list, every record (seeds included) is editable, and filters/pagination/sort are real.

The same objects API in 60 seconds — but the list is yours

# 1. create a project (no account, no key)
curl -X POST https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"name":"my objects api"}'
# → {"id":"f3gc8ypggm","adminKey":"…"}  — save both

# 2. an objects resource, seeded with 13 device-ish records
curl -X POST https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects/PROJECT_ID/resources \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'x-admin-key: ADMIN_KEY' \
  -d '{"name":"objects","seed":13,"fields":[
        {"name":"name","type":"title"},
        {"name":"color","type":"color"},
        {"name":"capacity","type":"oneOf","values":["64 GB","128 GB","256 GB","512 GB"]},
        {"name":"price","type":"price"}]}'

Pagination that actually paginates, with a total-count header:

curl "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/PROJECT_ID/objects?limit=2"
# → 2 records (not all 13), header x-total-count: 13

And the loop restful-api.dev can't do — create an object, see it in the list:

curl -X POST https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/PROJECT_ID/objects \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"name":"My Own Thing","color":"teal","capacity":"128 GB","price":49.5}'
# → 201 {"id":14,…}   — a short id, not 32 hex chars

curl https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/PROJECT_ID/objects
# → 14 records — yours is right there in the collection

curl "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/PROJECT_ID/objects?price_lte=50"
# → [{"id":14,"name":"My Own Thing",…}]   — filters work too

Seed records aren't reserved — every record is yours to update or delete:

curl -X PATCH https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/PROJECT_ID/objects/1 \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"name":"Renamed Seed"}'
# → 200 — no "reserved id" error

curl -X DELETE https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/PROJECT_ID/objects/14
# → {"ok":true}

Want the exact {id, name, data} envelope? It round-trips verbatim

If your code is already written against restful-api.dev's nested-data shape, you don't have to flatten anything — nested objects are stored and returned exactly as posted:

curl -X POST https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/PROJECT_ID/objects \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"name":"Google Pixel 6 Pro","data":{"color":"Cloudy White","capacity":"128 GB"}}'
# → 201; GET it back and data.color / data.capacity are intact

Every command above was run against a live project before this page was published.

restful-api.dev → Mockbird translation

Where restful-api.dev genuinely wins

Bias disclosed — this page is written by the Mockbird maker. restful-api.dev's strengths are real: zero setup of any kind — there is no "create a project" step, one well-known URL works in any classroom instantly; the reserved seed data means every student sees the same 13 devices no matter what the previous class did; persisted writes with per-object cleanup make it honestly better than JSONPlaceholder-style write-theater for teaching POST/PATCH/DELETE verbs; and it has been stable for years. If your lesson is just HTTP verbs against one URL, it's a fine choice — though the September 2026 50-requests/24h anonymous cap now bites exactly that classroom scenario: thirty students behind one school NAT share a single pooled budget. The walls above only start to matter when the API is supposed to behave like your backend — lists that include your data, filters, more than one collection.

Start now

# one curl — a whole seeded backend (products/orders/customers/reviews):
curl -X POST "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"name":"my api","preset":"ecommerce"}'

Or try the shared demo with zero setup — real pagination and a real single-object GET, no key:

curl "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/products?limit=2"
curl https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/demo/products/1

Facts checked September 6, 2026, hands-on against api.restful-api.dev: POST→GET-back→PATCH→DELETE on an own object all worked (credit where due); GET /objects returned the same 13 seeds immediately after a successful create (own object absent from the list); PUT /objects/1 and DELETE /objects/2 answered the reserved-id error verbatim; ?limit=2 and ?page=2&limit=5 each returned all 13; /users answered 401; batch ?id=3&id=5 worked. Test objects were deleted after verification. September 7, 2026 update: the 50-requests/24h anonymous cap was verified the day it appeared — a Cloudflare-Worker-originated GET /objects/1 answered HTTP 405 with the daily-limit error verbatim (shared egress IP over the pooled quota) while a direct request from a fresh IP answered 200. If restful-api.dev changes its behavior, re-check their site.

Full API reference in the docs. More guides: JSONPlaceholder alternative · CrudCrud alternative · DummyJSON alternative · GoRest alternative. Create your API →