The Broadcastify Calls Client API allows approved applications to read live and archived calls from Broadcastify Calls, look up the systems, talkgroups, conventional channels, nodes, and source IDs that produced them, and create and manage Calls playlists on behalf of authenticated users. It is one of four Broadcastify APIs (Live Audio Catalog, Calls Client, Calls Ingest / Upload, and Feed Owner), all covered in this Developers section.

Broadcastify Calls is a high-capacity service that ingests individual radio calls from conventional and trunked systems. The audio is captured and uploaded by volunteer-operated Calls nodes via the Broadcastify Calls Ingest / Upload API; the Client API is the consumer side, intended for applications that present those calls to end users.

We are incredibly developer-friendly. Broadcastify has been built on top of a developer ecosystem since day one, and we want third-party applications that genuinely extend what listeners can do with Calls to thrive.

Scope: Calls Client only

This API covers the consumer side of Broadcastify Calls. It does not upload calls (see the Calls Ingest / Upload API), does not stream live audio feeds (see the Live Audio Catalog API), and does not administer feeds or nodes on behalf of their owners (see the Feed Owner API).

Capabilities

At a high level, the Client API supports:

• Live calls: stream the most recent calls for an entity over time
• Group and county discovery: list all groups captured in a county, retrieve details for a single group
• Node, source, and call lookups: retrieve metadata for the capturing node, the source unit ID on the originating system, and any individual call
• Group archives: retrieve all calls for a group within a time range
• Playlists: list, create, edit, and delete playlists owned by the authenticated user; add and remove groups from those playlists; list public playlists by county

Full endpoint reference, authentication flow, parameters, response schemas, and rate limits are provided to approved developers as part of the onboarding process.

Entity model

The Client API uses a small set of consistent identifiers. These conventions also apply to the Ingest / Upload API.

Service tags and restricted content

Broadcastify Calls ingests every call its nodes send, but access to calls on certain service tags is restricted. Tags marked allowedListen=false (Law Tactical and other sensitive categories) are not accessible to the general public and are limited to the node providers who captured them. Your application must respect the allowedListen flag on every tag it surfaces.

What the API is for

The Client API exists so that radio-related tools and listener-facing utilities can integrate Broadcastify Calls into their workflow: a personal dashboard that surfaces calls from a user's chosen talkgroups, a playlist manager, an alerting tool a user runs against their own subscriptions, an analytical view of activity on a specific system or site. The unifying thread is that the application is a genuine extension of what an end user is already doing with Broadcastify Calls.

Approved applications are required to have each end user authenticate with their own Broadcastify credentials. For functionality that requires premium, each end user must hold an active Broadcastify premium subscription against their own account. Credentials may not be shared or pooled, and developers do not subsidize subscriptions on behalf of their users.

What the API is not for

We are currently seeing unprecedented demand for API access driven by AI-assisted developers ("vibe-coding") who are using LLMs to spin up applications, sites, and mobile apps that effectively recreate the functionality of Broadcastify itself. We are not licensing any new "police scanner" style applications, free or paid, hobby or commercial, that wrap the Calls platform into a competing listening experience. The Broadcastify website and the Broadcastify mobile experience are the front doors to Calls. We will not approve developer access for projects whose purpose is to build a parallel front door on top of our data and infrastructure.

Likewise, applications designed to redistribute, mirror, scrape, or resell Broadcastify calls, metadata, or audio, in any form, are not candidates for a developer key.

Commercial and licensed use

Almost every non-personal use case (commercial listening apps, white-label data products, monitoring and alerting services for organizations, training data and AI/ML pipelines, journalism and analytics platforms, situational awareness products) is a commercial use of our products and services and requires a formal license agreement.

All Broadcastify commercial licenses are royalty-based or monthly-fee-based, depending on use case, and governed by a written license agreement covering the specific use case, redistribution rights, attribution, and audit terms. Licensed API access is issued against a signed agreement, so if your project is commercial, the license is the path forward, not a free developer key.

AI and machine-learning use cases are available under license, and we are ready to partner with serious partners on them. Exploratory or "let me try it out and see what I can build" requests, including personal AI projects and early-stage startup experimentation, are treated as commercial use. We are simply not scaled to underwrite open-ended experimentation against our catalog while people figure out whether they want to turn it into a business. We require a defined use case before we can engage. Be ready to partner, and we will be ready to partner with you.

Requesting access

To apply for a developer key or to start a licensing conversation, please write to support@broadcastify.com. Be specific. Helpful detail includes:

• Exactly what the application does, what users it is for, and how each user reaches it
• What Calls data the application needs (live, archive, specific systems or counties) and why it cannot be served by the public site or mobile app
• Whether it integrates with a radio, scanner programmer, codeplug editor, or other radio-related hardware/software
• For commercial use: company name, projected user count, business model, and the commercial terms you have in mind
• For AI/ML use: training versus inference, dataset retention policy, model distribution, and projected query volume

Requests that boil down to "because I want to," or that read as a pasted LLM prompt with no specific use case, will be declined. We will always tell you why and, where appropriate, point you toward either a better-scoped request or the licensing path. We are happy to support developers who are extending what listeners can do with Broadcastify Calls, and we are open to commercial conversations for everything else.