Greetings,
I am interested in creating a website that offers free APIs for use in various projects. For instance, you could use the API to obtain search results or access the MyIP API. I am open to suggestions for other APIs that would be helpful.
There is only one restriction I will impose, which is a limit on the number of requests per second.
If I proceed with this idea, would you be interested in using it? Please note that any financial support would be voluntary donations (No Stupid Memberships, Credits, or any pay-to-use)
Thank you.
… what?
This sounds like the pitch of a tech bro who just heard someone use the term API but doesn’t actually know what it is
No, I do not want or need a middleman whose only job is to pass my data through to another API. It’s a huge security risk and potentially a violation of my and my user’s privacy. Pretending everything is perfect, it’s still another point of failure. Your API service could become unavailable. Your API service could simply wrap others in a huge library and still that means some of them are going to be outdated.
There is no strong reason to do this unless you are binding these services together to create a new platform, like what game engines typically do. They take a rendering library, physics engine, etc., tie them all together with an implementation, and allow you to build the higher-level stuff. If that’s your idea but for web development or something then I could see the use but just “everything goes in this monolithic API” is not only a terrible idea, it’s a dangerous one.
What?
I think they mean an API-aggregating API that would be called “100% API” with loads of services supported but no idea how to pay for all that.
There is only one reason to use an API — a developer has a use-case for it. Setting aside all of the security concerns, the existence of some API proxy is not useful in and of itself. Not only is it dead simple to set something like that up, by oneself, thus eliminating the security risks of relying on a third party, it’s just not going to gain traction if it doesn’t add something that makes it more useful than simply calling the endpoint API.
It’s cool you’re looking to try things, but perhaps coming up with a novel service would be a better use of time and effort.
I wish you luck.
I’ll carry the odd opinion here and say there’s actually a way this could be useful. You have to add value to a product to make it worth your time and effort, increase adoption, and make it at least self-sustainable. Find reasons to justify why this should exist. For a start - This could save time on projects where similar data has to be loaded on a page from multiple api endpoints but it doesn’t match. - an old example, but one that I fought once - looking up the time zone of a city from one api, then the time offset from UTC from another api, and trying to relate it all together. That meant my functions had to match that data up on the client side because there were imperfect text matches.
As a second example, if you were able to cache or keep record of data from upstream endpoints that often takes a while to gather because they can’t/won’t, you might offer a performance advantage or datasets which were previously unavailable to a user without monitoring data coming from that API over an extended period of time.
There’s more you can do, but that hinges again on what I previously said, find your pitch and solve problems that the others have created and won’t fix.
