What’s the story for exporting data look like? E.g if I started with you but then wanted to migrate to a home grown solution.
Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
51–60 of 84 posts
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#52Congrats on the launch. Very appealing product. I thought RapidAPI.com would be a direct competitor, but their site changed a lot. Have they pivoted from monetizing an API, directly? If so, then I'd definitely keep Kable on my radar.
RapidAPI does offer some of the tools that Kable offers. And if you're looking to monetize a single REST endpoint, RapidAPI is probably the right tool for the job. Kable is infrastructure for API companies, brands, and larger projects. You wouldn't find Twilio's SMS API in RapidAPI's marketplace, nor would you find many of today's hottest new API-first companies. Kable's mission is to help those companies launch quic…
> You wouldn't find Twilio's SMS API in RapidAPI's marketplace
Twilio monetizes 3 of their APIs on RapidAPI including the SMS API:
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#53This totally solves something I don't want to have to build at this stage! I hacked together a garbage API key system that has nothing to do with my platform's core competencies.
Your offering is so full of useful functionality, too. Reports, metering, ... so much good. I could totally see this becoming a Twilio or Stripe for APIs.
Really, really awesome. Congrats! I'll be looking to sign up soon.
Edit: my platform is built in Rust and I don't expect you to have an SDK for that anytime soon (I'm off the beaten path). I'll see what your API looks like :)
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#54Great to see a new option!
Apigee and Mulesoft went "enterprise." AWS API Gateway and GCP Endpoints kind of stagnated. Seems like the only option for small and medium-sized SaaS businesses that want to sell access to APIs is to roll their own or fully commit to RapidAPI. (Please let me know other options I am forgetting or not aware of!)
We currently "roll our own" using Kong, Auth0, and a Rails app. Not sure if we'd want to outsource all of those components. But will keep an eye on this option for the future, particularly for doing metered billing.
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#55This totally solves something I don't want to have to build at this stage! I hacked together a garbage API key system that has nothing to do with my platform's core competencies. Your offering is so full of useful functionality, too. Reports, metering, ... so much good. I could totally see this becoming a Twilio or Stripe for APIs. Really, really awesome. Congrats! I'll be looking to sign up soon. Edit: my platform i…
Hey, glad to hear it!
You're actually not the first person who's asked for a Rust SDK. This is something that is already in our plans for the near future.
In the meantime, all of Kable can be accessed via HTTPS REST endpoints. I wouldn't recommend using Kable for authentication over REST due to the potential latency issues it could cause for your API. But all of our functionality around pricing, metering, billing, and invoicing can be accessed directly, even without a Rust library.
Check out our documentation for a closer look at the REST API. Would be happy to chat some more over email to help you get started until our Rust library is available.
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#56What’s the story for exporting data look like? E.g if I started with you but then wanted to migrate to a home grown solution.
There are a variety of different storage formats behind the curtain at Kable. Some things (like stored invoices) are trivial to export. Others (like full request histories) might be a bit more complicated. That said, we never want to lock you in.
We will always support customers who need to export data out of Kable into another system.
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#57> Our pricing is pay-as-you-go based on the volume of events we store and the revenue we help our customers generate. That means we get to dogfood our own software for usage-based billing! So what is your pricing? The website says "starting at $200 / month", but before I go to sign up and try to integrate, I'd like to be able to estimate if it'd be $200/mo for my company or $2,000/mo. P.S.: I signed up, even got to a…
The truth is that we're still iterating on our pricing model which is why it's somewhat vague on our website. We offer a few different pricing tiers that range from Free to $200/month to $800/month depending on your revenue and usage of the platform before Enterprise. If you handle very heavy traffic (millions of events recorded daily), we'll help build a pricing plan that makes sense for your business.
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#58Great to see a new option! Apigee and Mulesoft went "enterprise." AWS API Gateway and GCP Endpoints kind of stagnated. Seems like the only option for small and medium-sized SaaS businesses that want to sell access to APIs is to roll their own or fully commit to RapidAPI. (Please let me know other options I am forgetting or not aware of!) We currently "roll our own" using Kong, Auth0, and a Rails app. Not sure if we'd…
This comment encapsulates the inspiration behind Kable beautifully.
Developers I've spoken with have struggled to get up and running with AWS API Gateway or GCP Endpoints. They each had plans to evolve their pricing model based on business-specific metrics (like monthly active users, transactions processed, or requests to specific APIs), and they weren't able to get the per-contract or per-endpoint pricing flexibility out of these offerings that they wanted.
Kable's greatest strength is its usage metering and billing. Not every developer is going to need to outsource their entire API gateway, and that's alright. In the early days, this does help get to market faster. At scale, though, when billing becomes more and more complex, is where Kable's greatest strengths in billing shine.
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#59I'm the founder of Saasify, a similar platform from a few years back. Love what you guys are doing, though I think you may run into some of the same issues that we ran into. Here's our post-mortem that you'll hopefully find helpful https://transitivebullsh.it/saasify-vc-feedback
Great feedback, thank you. From what I can gather, the biggest differences between Kable and Saasify are the target market and core focus. Where Saasify is focused on micro SaaS projects, Kable is aimed at helping the growing population of API-first businesses. And from a core focus perspective, where Saasify is focused on a wide range of developer needs (user accounts, marketing sites, documentation, etc), Kable is focused on the core elements of an API business: authentication, metrics, and billing. But there's definitely a good amount of similarity here, and I love to meet folks building in a similar space.
Re: Launch HN: Kable (YC W22) – All-in-one platform for API products
#60Wish you all the best so wanted to share a bug: https://imgur.com/a/2kr81fH
Your web app is probably burning a lot of unnecessary render cycles as a side effect of this behavior as well