specification: API Commons Plans
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/Plans
provider: BNSF
providerId: bnsf
generated: '2026-09-06'
method: searched
source: https://www.bnsf.com/ship-with-bnsf/support-services/customer-api/registration/
docs:
- https://www.bnsf.com/ship-with-bnsf/support-services/customer-api/
- https://www.bnsf.com/ship-with-bnsf/support-services/customer-api/registration/
- https://www.bnsf.com/ship-with-bnsf/support-services/customer-api/support/
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-09-06'
tags:
- Freight
- Railroad
- Shipping
- Intermodal
- Logistics
plan_count: 0
description: >-
  BNSF publishes no plans and no prices for the Customer API. The whole developer area — Home,
  Getting Started, Catalog, Developer's Console, Push Notifications, Registration and API Support —
  contains no pricing page, no tier table, no quota table and no billing language. The API is a
  customer-relationship service, not a metered product: access is granted to registered BNSF freight
  customers (and to third parties an authorised shipper names) and the freight contract, not an API
  plan, is what is priced.
plans: []
access_model:
  pricing: not-published
  entitlement: >-
    Registration is free but not self-service. A caller needs a BNSF.com User ID for their company,
    a conforming client certificate, and a BNSF configuration step that the provider states takes up
    to five business days.
  tiers:
  - name: Unrestricted Services
    price: not-published
    entitlement: available to any registered API caller once configuration completes
  - name: Restricted Services
    price: not-published
    entitlement: >-
      A named subset of operations (flagged with a padlock in the Developer's Console) requiring a
      separate approval request through the Customer Portal, available in Production only, and only
      after at least one unrestricted service is demonstrably working.
  data_entitlement: >-
    Independent of any tier, a caller only receives data for equipment whose waybill names their
    company, or for which a shipper has issued a Letter of Authorization or added them in the ZS
    monitoring role.
environments:
- name: Trial
  host: api-trial.bnsf.com
  port: 6443
  price: not-published
- name: Production
  host: api.bnsf.com
  port: 6443
  price: not-published
note: >-
  This file previously carried a scaffold with invented Free / Professional / Enterprise tiers and
  invented quotas (1,000 and 100,000 requests per month). Nothing on BNSF's site supports any of
  those numbers; they were replaced on 2026-09-06 with a measured plan_count of 0. The real published
  throughput limits are gateway throttles and live in rate-limits/bnsf-rate-limits.yml.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kinlane@gmail.com