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This is a huge value add for my customers.
So here is an API we would have paid for, and I assume many still will: A product catalog. They do exist, but they are expensive and aren't not that great. What we where after and gave up on was an API that would accept an EAN-13 barcode and return product details, images, good descriptions, in multiple language (specifically NOT machine translated) and possible alternative EAN-13 barcodes for the same product. As a…
A lot of products in this space are priced crazy for small to medium manufacturers.
In general I might pay for APIs that correlate data from multiple sources into one endpoint.
As an European, with the current energy situation, I might pay for an API that combines weather data, electricity market prices and other factors into a single API that estimates electricity costs.
Or maybe an API that combines ratings from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Letterboxd etc into one call.
I would gladly pay for all my appliances to have a local API rather than phoning home and requiring some proprietary blob of smartphone app.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are people making 6 figures selling CS:GO skin price feeds. Really? I was working on a project a few years ago that needed this data so I setup a scraper to get all price data from Steam and Bitskins. It was running 24/7 and putting everything into a database that was very clean and neat. Maybe I should boot that back up and just sell access to the API...
Yes. The gambling sites that accept skin deposits invest a lot of effort into guaranteeing that someone can't fleece them by manipulating the price of an obscure item. On a similar note, there are also folk making 6 figs selling access to steam game hour idlers.
Third-party risk is the biggest problem with APIs. The amount of calls I've been in where a third-party provider tried to sell their API and told me they don't need versioning right now, they will "try to" pre-announce breaking changes, they don't have an SLA or uptime commitment, etc. etc. is way too many. It's so hard to find an API provider that seems to be trustworthy enough to build a product on top of it.
I feel like there's a magic number of salaried positions that need to be tied to an API provider, to ensure it's both dynamic enough to react to generational changes in networking/security/etc. but also slow enough to not keep throwing everything overboard whenever a new framework or middle-manager comes along.
So here is an API we would have paid for, and I assume many still will: A product catalog. They do exist, but they are expensive and aren't not that great. What we where after and gave up on was an API that would accept an EAN-13 barcode and return product details, images, good descriptions, in multiple language (specifically NOT machine translated) and possible alternative EAN-13 barcodes for the same product. As a…
I’m running a SaaS turning affiliate platform content into an API which can be looked up by EAN13 : https://datafeedapi.com
Current users are publishers wanting to display affiliate links on their website but I could probably repurpose it for a more generic product search API without the affiliate links and different pricing. If anyone is interested, you can reach me at patrick_[at]_datafeedapi.com
Doc is here : https://datafeedapi.com/api/v1/redoc/
So here is an API we would have paid for, and I assume many still will: A product catalog. They do exist, but they are expensive and aren't not that great. What we where after and gave up on was an API that would accept an EAN-13 barcode and return product details, images, good descriptions, in multiple language (specifically NOT machine translated) and possible alternative EAN-13 barcodes for the same product. As a…
I love building APIs. The biggest hurdle I see is that you need two active parties on both ends of the API to convince: There is a user, which needs to be convinced to use the API, and a supplier, which also needs to use the API. And there is no incentive to use the API for one or another.