charitybase.uk

What It Is

CharityBase is a database and GraphQL API built around UK charities. It cleans, aggregates, and analyzes fragmented data from sources such as the Charity Commission, Companies House, 360 Giving, charity websites, ONS, and social media, then exposes structured query capabilities via an API. It is positioned for startups, funders, and researchers.

Core Capabilities and Developer Experience

At its core is a single GraphQL endpoint: https://charitybase.uk/api/graphql. Requests must include Authorization: Apikey YOUR_API_KEY. The API supports filtering charities by criteria such as keywords and financial income. Results can be queried as count, aggregate, or detailed list data, with limit and skip pagination support. The documentation provides examples for cURL, JavaScript, React/Apollo, and Python, and also explains GET vs. POST, variables, error responses, and how to use the Playground. For developers familiar with GraphQL, the learning curve should be relatively low.

Open Source, Pricing, and Ecosystem

The page clearly states that it is “open source & free to use” and includes a GitHub entry point. The main content does not provide information on paid plans, usage quotas, rate limits, SLA, or commercial support, so it is better suited to open data projects, prototyping, and research scenarios. In terms of ecosystem, it is not a general-purpose development platform but a vertical data API; its value mainly comes from integrating multiple UK charity data sources.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths include being free and open source, offering a flexible query model, providing plenty of documentation examples, and including an interactive Playground. It can significantly reduce the work required to collect, clean, and serve charity data yourself. The drawbacks are that its data coverage is clearly UK-focused, while the API key application process, stability commitments, and rate limits are not explained in the main text. The documentation also warns against using pagination for bulk downloads, suggesting that large-scale data export scenarios may be limited. There is also no clear information about self-hosting.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is suitable for developers or research teams building UK charity search tools, grantmaking due diligence systems, nonprofit research analytics, or data visualization tools. If your target is Chinese nonprofit organizations or global NGO data, you will need to look for alternatives such as local civil affairs data, open government datasets, or other international nonprofit databases. The main text does not mention access from mainland China, so actual network connectivity and API availability need to be tested. As no paid plan is disclosed, there is currently no clear payment barrier.