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Candid

Candid (formed from the 2019 merger of Foundation Center and GuideStar) helps social sector organizations advance their missions by sharing information, breaking down barriers, and improving giving. Candid maintains the most comprehensive set of data on U.S. nonprofits, foundations, grants, and philanthropy, and exposes that data through a family of developer APIs — Essentials, Premier, Charity Check, Demographics, Grants, News, Taxonomy, Eligibility, and PDF/Bulk variants — available through the Candid Developer Portal.

agent ready

Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Candid the way a machine reads it — 16 machine-readable artifacts across 9 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Candid scores 46.3/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 46.3/100 · developing
Contract Quality 14.6 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 4.8 / 20
Commercial Clarity 12.1 / 20
Operational Transparency 4.8 / 13
Governance 0.0 / 12
Discoverability 10.0 / 10
Agent readiness — 48/100 · agent ready
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile Candid

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Candid. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 9

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Candid Premier API

Deep nonprofit profile data. Returns comprehensive records for a given organization including financials, programs, leadership, board, grants received and awarded, operating det...

Candid Charity Check API

Real-time nonprofit verification and compliance screening used for due diligence, donation compliance, and tax-deductibility checks. Returns IRS 501(c)(3) status, revocation his...

Candid Demographics API

Structured demographic data voluntarily provided by nonprofits about their staff, board, and populations served. Enables funders and platforms to analyze equity, diversity, and ...

Candid Grants API

Access to Candid's global grants dataset — summary statistics, funders, recipients, and individual transaction records. Useful for philanthropic benchmarking, funder research, a...

Candid News API

Search and retrieve philanthropic news content from Candid's curated news database covering funders, grantees, sector trends, and policy. Supports customizable parameters for da...

Candid Taxonomy API

Returns Candid's philanthropic classification system (subject, population, support-strategy, and geographic area taxonomies) so integrators can consistently tag and query nonpro...

Candid Nonprofit Eligibility API

Evaluates whether a given nonprofit is eligible to receive a grant or donation based on configurable rules — IRS status, country, OFAC, custom program criteria — to automate gra...

Candid Lookup API

Operations for retrieving lookup values and filter metadata.

Candid Search API

Operations for searching the Candid nonprofit database.

Scroll within the panel for all 9 ·

Open Collections 1

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Candid Essentials API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Candid Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Candid Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Candid Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Candid Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Candid Agentic Access

7 operations · 4 acting

7 operations · 4 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for Candid — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 2

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Agent Surfaces 2

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Operate 1

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Company 2

The organization behind the API

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/candid · machine-readable index on apis.io