Tenor API

» see tenor.com/gifapi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the tenor api was the part of the gif economy you never saw. you opened a chat client. you typed "shrug" into the gif picker. the picker called tenor and a grid of gifs came back. that grid was tenor for most people, even if they never visited tenor.com. honestly, that was the whole point of an api.

tenor started in february 2014 as riffsy, a san francisco startup making a third-party gif keyboard for ios. david mcintosh and erick hachenburg led the founding team alongside frank nawabi. by 2016 the company had rebranded to tenor and was selling itself as the "emotional search engine of the internet". the api was the side door that let any chat app integrate the same gif search backend the keyboard ran on. discord wired it up early. whatsapp followed. by the late 2010s the tenor api was the default gif search for most messaging apps not owned by giphy's eventual buyer, meta.

google acquired tenor on march 27, 2018, folding it into google images. the api kept running as a public product. the consumer tenor.com site never quite became a household url, the api became the load-bearing thing. when google announced the shutdown on january 13, 2026, the comment sections on the announcement were mostly discord users wondering what their server gif picker would do.

~ the dossier ~

~ the embed era ~

between 2015 and 2026 the gif picker became standard furniture in chat. discord had one. slack had one too. they almost all hit tenor. the api was free for developers, monetization was supposed to come later from sponsored gifs and partnerships. google never really turned that meter on for the api side.

that is also the case against the api. an indefinitely free public endpoint backed by a public company is a maintenance bill with no revenue line. when the parent company is in cost-cutting mode and the consumer product is the one with the brand value, the developer endpoint is the line you cut first. that is the language the shutdown post used. "we've made the decision to sunset the tenor api on june 30, 2026."

~ the day the api dies ~

new api key registrations stopped on january 13, 2026. existing keys keep working until june 30. after june 30 every chat app that wired up tenor either ships an update pointing at giphy or klipy, or breaks. discord has already moved its default search provider. whatsapp is reportedly going to klipy.

the consumer tenor.com site is still alive, hosting the same gif library on the web. it just does not feed anyone else's picker anymore. eleven years was a decent run for what was essentially a free utility for the entire chat ecosystem. the cost of running it stopped being justifiable on a quarterly earnings call.

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