There are no pros for craigslist having an API. This is a for-profit company that has chosen not to be greedy bastards. If they wanted they could have an advert

There are no pros for craigslist having an API. This is a for-profit company that has chosen not to be greedy bastards. If they wanted they could have an advertisement on every single page of the site but they don't. Craigslist is cost free to almost all users, is fast, and has little down time. Here are some of the reasons why offering an API is not a good fit for them. * Craigslist does not need users driven to it which is a side effect of having an API. They are already large and in charge. * Unless they charge for the API it is a waste of CPU cycles and eventually technical support from an actual person to support this. It is a cost sink. * Craigslist does not sell anything directly like ebay or amazon. Ebay and Amazon have apis to drive traffic to them. Then a user sells something on the service and ebay/amazon get a cut, that is how their services work, not craigslist. * "if people care so much about craigslist features, then just build something and offer them the code for free." This was a comment from another user and it makes a great point. Like the engineer who stayed on at Apple to finish his project, something like that could happen to make craigslist better. Has anyone bothered to try and lets see the code? * craigslist has not shown any intention to move into other markets besides online ads. A publicly facing API would allow others to develop new services and allow craigslist to buy them. This has not happened. * No major corporation came along and helped craigslist why should they help you? In fact craigslist fought against entrenched newspapers across the globe to create their user base. To sum this point up "There is no such thing as a Free lunch". I am sure I am forgetting a few other good reasons why they are not offering an API. To me it comes down to a bunch of people bitching about how they built a service on top of data they did not own or control and when it was taken away they act shocked. To me that is just plain business idiocy. If you start a business one of the first things you do is secure your supply chain, in this case the apartment listing data.