Exercise GIF API licensing:
what you can actually ship

Why licensing matters more than the dataset

Most developers evaluating exercise APIs focus on catalog size first — how many exercises, how many GIFs. That's the wrong first question for a commercial product. The dataset is rarely the risk; the license attached to it is. Shipping GIFs or exercise text you don't have clear commercial rights to is the kind of problem that surfaces after launch, not during a demo — when a provider changes marketplace terms, restricts a plan, or a contributor's license turns out not to cover for-profit use.

Before picking a provider, you want answers to three questions: does the license explicitly cover commercial use, is attribution required, and what happens to your app if the provider changes terms or you exceed a rate limit mid-launch.

Licensing and rate limit comparison

Numbers for WorkoutX below are published on our own pricing and docs pages. Numbers for other providers reflect well-known public facts about how each is distributed; specific plan pricing on marketplace listings can change, so verify current terms directly with each provider before committing.

What commercial use actually requires

Whichever provider you pick, a commercial-safe integration needs four things in writing, not implied:

• An explicit commercial-use grant. "Free to use" in a README is not the same as a license that names commercial or for-profit use. Look for the actual terms document, not marketing copy.
• Attribution requirements, if any. Some open datasets require crediting the source in your app or documentation — confirm whether that applies before shipping.
• A rate limit and quota that match your traffic. A free tier built for prototyping (e.g. a handful of requests per minute) will not survive a real launch; know the paid-tier pricing before you need it, not after you hit a 429.
• Stability of terms. A direct vendor relationship with published pricing (like WorkoutX's dashboard and Terms of Service) is easier to plan around than a listing on a third-party marketplace that can adjust plan limits independently of the underlying data provider.

On WorkoutX specifically: displaying the exercise data and animations to the users of your own apps and websites is included in the standard API license across all plans, including the free tier (whose media is watermarked) — see the Terms of Service for the exact license language before you ship to production. Paid plans start at $19/month (Starter, 5,000 requests/month) and scale to $79/month (Scale, 100,000 requests/month), with Enterprise above that and no RapidAPI or marketplace hop in between your app and the data. See pricing for the full limits.

How WorkoutX licenses its animations

WorkoutX v2 doesn't deliver GIFs. Its 1,900+ exercises come as 600×720 MP4 animations at 30 fps (2,700+ clips, with male and female models), each with a JPEG poster frame. The rule for using them is the same on every plan: stream them, don't copy them.

• Signed, expiring links. Each exercise response includes a media object with mp4, poster and expiresAt. The links expire after 24–25 hours. Load the animation directly from the link when you show the exercise.
• No downloading or self-hosting. Downloading the files, keeping copies, or serving them from your own servers or CDN isn't permitted on any plan. Normal browser and video-player caching is fine.
• Store ids, not URLs. Save the exercise id (for example ex_WOZL6H) and get fresh links from the exercise response or GET /v2/exercises/{id}/media when you need them.
• Watermarks stay. The Free plan serves watermarked 300×360 previews. Every paid plan gets the same 600×720 media without a watermark.

If you're on v1, it keeps serving GIFs for existing integrations, and you'll get at least 30 days' notice by email before it's retired. The v1 to v2 migration guide covers switching from stored GIF URLs to stored exercise ids.

A note on ExerciseDB's RapidAPI free tier

ExerciseDB is distributed exclusively through RapidAPI, which means both pricing and rate limits are set at the marketplace listing level rather than by a single vendor dashboard you control. Free tiers on RapidAPI listings are commonly rate-limited to a low per-minute ceiling — figures like 10 requests/minute show up frequently in developer reports — but the authoritative number is whatever the current listing states, since marketplace plan terms can be updated by the publisher. If you're comparison-shopping specifically for the free tier's rate limit or a fixed pricing figure, confirm it on the live RapidAPI listing rather than relying on cached search results or older blog posts, including this one.

Frequently asked questions