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The 'API marketplace' and 'API economy' narratives are largely pushed by companies who make API proxies: Mashape, Mulesoft, etc. (EDIT: not Mashable, they're un
by niftich 10y ago
The 'API marketplace' and 'API economy' narratives are largely pushed by companies who make API proxies: Mashape, Mulesoft, etc. (EDIT: not Mashable, they're unrelated)
I've yet to hear true success stories in this space; to me it just seems like wishful thinking (on part of the marketplace and on part of API developers) about a second app boom; notably, in the hype cycle, the API boom has largely been superseded by the Chatbot boom, which is functionally very similar, although the gatekeepers are different.
That is not to say you can't make money this way. Perhaps it's useful for hobbyist-level projects, or cut-from-the-same-cloth wrapper APIs that hardly offer anything unique but at least one sucker signs up anyway -- the same as with apps, really. Is this actually a thriving market?
- sheraz 10y agoExactly this. It is like all those data marketplaces from 2010. Infochimps most famously and azure shuttering their data marketplace recently. This has the same feel.
- drvdevd 10y agoI can see how this market has a BS feel to it (and have noticed this too lately), but at least the general concept of "API" leaves a lot of room for interpretation... perhaps much more functionality can be exposed via an API on such a marketplace than could ever be offered by an "app", etc.
- sinzone 10y agotypo: MashaBLE is a blog and media property nothing related with APIs
- bjacobel 10y agoThere was a subthread on HN not too long ago from a guy who quit his day job to scale ipinfo.io, which sells an API subscription product for geoIP lookups. He's doing fairly well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328971 So I think there is a market for services like this, especially since API Gateway takes away a lot of the kinds of scaling headaches the creator talks about in the linked post.
- dirtyaura 10y agoI'd say that ipinfo.io sells data, just through an API. Building a data set is expensive and takes time. Pure API plays are harder, I think.
- Pigo 10y agoWe've been using the Azure API Management on my team for well over a year now on a couple projects. Though monetizing it is still just a goal, it's been pretty useful just for the features auth, logging, CORS, and some routing issues.
- LyalinDotCom 10y agoHere is the Azure API management link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/api-management/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/api-management/
- Natsu 10y agoMy impression is that it's not a big thing yet because many of the tools really don't support monetization any too well right now (I'd be interested in hearing counter-examples). That said, once the tooling catches up, it will be interesting to see if it actually takes off or not.
- blazespin 10y agoYeah, it's a huge huge market for sure. It's why pretty much every Web APP provides an API to integrate with. They don't do it because it's worthless :) API Marketplace might help discovery. Not sure about that though.