Every page of Leonardo’s notebooks is free — the scans, his Italian, and an English translation of each folio. Memberships pay for the services built on top, and keep the library open for everyone.
$0 forever
The whole library, open to everyone.
API: 60 / hour without a key · 1,000 / day with one
$40 a year · founding rate
The Accademia — for people who read Leonardo.
API: 10,000 / day
$99 a year
Everything Patron, with room to build.
API: 100,000 / day
No account needed to read the library or call the API — 60 / hour per IP, every endpoint. Read the API docs →
| Free | Patron | Developer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The library | |||
| Every scan, every collection | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Leonardo's Italian (e-Leo transcription) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| English Reader's Edition — titles, summaries, translation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Search in English and Italian | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Download any single page, any size | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| The Accademia | |||
| Leonardo in French, German and Spanish | — | Rolling out | Rolling out |
| Your notebook — saved pages and notes | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Typeset editions as e-books (EPUB) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full-resolution archives, per collection | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ask the notebooks (chat) | — | Soon | Soon |
| Numbered Founding Patron card | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| The Da-Vinci API | |||
| Without a key | 60 / hour | — | — |
| With your key | 1,000 / day | 10,000 / day | 100,000 / day |
| Patron languages in API responses | — | ✓ | ✓ |
No. Every endpoint answers without a key, at 60 / hour per IP address. Sign in and you get a free key instantly on /developers — 1,000 / day, no form to fill in.
Yes. Every page of the library is public and open to search engines and AI crawlers — that’s how people find Leonardo. Please be gentle, and for anything bulk use the API or the downloads: they’re faster for you and cheaper for us. The API itself is marked off-limits to crawlers in robots.txt; call it directly instead.
The API answers 429 rate_limited with a plain explanation, how long until your window resets, and a Retry-After header. Every response carries X-RateLimit-Remaining so you see it coming, and if you’re using your own key we email you the first time you hit the day’s limit. Nothing is ever billed for going over.
It’s the Patron membership — the Founding name is for the first members, who keep the $40 a year rate for as long as they stay and carry a numbered card (No. 001 onward) on the Patron page.
Patron is for reading: the Accademia’s services and a generous API key. Developer is for building — apps, agents, research pipelines — with ten times the Patron limit, and it includes everything Patron does. You can move from one to the other at any time and keep your number.
Any time, from the Patron page (“Manage membership”). You keep access until the end of the year you paid for; your notebook is kept if you return.
Yes — the English Reader’s Edition of every page is free to read, cite and build on, with attribution to venivididavinci.com. Memberships pay for the services built on top of the library, not for the library.
They’re free. Join when you want more of them.