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Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

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51–60 of 151 posts

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#51

Easy way to get geo from ip. I hate a lot of the options: downloading binarys or using google's that just regulates you.

https://ipinfo.io works well. Alternatively, CloudFlare also works well if you just need the country code, which it can attach as an HTTP header to each request.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#52

1. A process engine that can execute a process given as an EPC (ideally with an embeddable gui editor). The app notifies the API of event completions and the API allows you to query the current state of the process. 2. An embeddable survey tool like SurveyGizmo, but completely whitelabelable, including the survey editor 3. An API for benchmark scores for iOS and Android devices (give me all devices that are as fast o…

What does EPC stand for?

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#53
A webhook or something that would tell me when a phone number changes owner.

I.e.: when we bill someone weekly for something and then the phone number changes owner we want to stop immediately.

Same if you send sms-es that you don’t want delivered to anyone but the intended recipient.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#54
post #22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a solution for this on HN not a week ago..

Here it is: https://ipinfo.io

These free databases are really inaccurate in many cases compared to e.g. Maxmind. E.g. this thinks my IP address is 100 km away near the German border, but Maxmind's commercial DB puts me a 7 minute walk away in the center of Amsterdam.

They're better than nothing, but be careful when relying on them for anything you need accurate Geo-IP info for.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#55

An API for handling image processing/uploading to S3: Use 1: Send a high-res image in any format (like, say, tiff), the original, a web-optimal jpg at full resolution, and any sizes that might be needed in various contexts (thumbnail, inline display at any screen density) are put into the right place in my S3 bucket. Use 2: Using ids or original file names, point the API to an image or array of images, uploaded via U…

Yeah, dealing with images are usually the worst.

Until you're unlucky enough to have to deal with video.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#56
post #3

Product information. Things like "The mainboard named XY from producer ABC has the manufacturer sku 1234567, the EAN-13 00123... and the UPC 01234...". Ideally add to that the custom specs, like "it has that many usb slots and this socket" etc. But I think I miss part of the picture here, there is probably a channel transmitting structured information like this from manufacturers to vendors, I just never found it.

Technopedia (a BDNA product) does exactly this, but might be expensive for a startup.

https://www.bdna.com/products/technopedia/

Disclaimer: I used to work for BDNA, and on this product, but have since left the company.

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#57
post #6

I wanted machine learning-based app configuration. So I built it and spun it out as a separate product: https://improve.ai/

ok so, for lack of value, I deleted my previous response to your post: "wow this is super awesome- wish I had a use case for it!"

but now that improve.ai ads are starting to pop up in my Facebook feed, thought I could provide some value letting you know about that mistarget. XD

Re: Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

#60

Subscription billing API that deals with reminders, renewals, e-mails/cancellations, etc. Everything related to that. All existing solutions don't work well if revenue per user is a "measley" 2 USD per month.

Try ChargeBee? Solves a lot of subscription-related problems. It's a product and not API.
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