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Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

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Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#2
This will not end well.

If someone with millions or billions of dollars doesn’t have an official API after operating for years, that’s because they don’t want to have one. You may receive a Cease and Desist letter, or they might block your IPs, or just scramble their markup in ways that are hard to figure out. Whatever their approach, they likely have more money and manpower to throw at stopping you than you have to evade them, especially if you’re doing this to multiple large and powerful companies.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#3
TIL Venmo uses GraphQL.

It's interesting to note, too, that the current Venmo website posts to https://account.venmo.com/api/eligibility to get a token and then separately to https://account.venmo.com/api/payments to perform the actual payment. Those endpoints and shapes are different than what's in the script, which posts to https://api.venmo.com/v1/payments (https://github.com/Integuru-AI/Venmo-Unofficial-API/blob/a28...). I wonder if the v1 API is an older one used for some other service (the mobile app, maybe?).

Thanks for sharing, OP.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#4
post #2

This will not end well. If someone with millions or billions of dollars doesn’t have an official API after operating for years, that’s because they don’t want to have one. You may receive a Cease and Desist letter, or they might block your IPs, or just scramble their markup in ways that are hard to figure out. Whatever their approach, they likely have more money and manpower to throw at stopping you than you have to…

I'd also be a bit worried about using something like this in production, especially if it's packaged as a npm lib. Even if the original maintainer has good intentions, it'd be all too easy for some malicious actor to offer them a million dollars to introduce a trojan/credential MITM scraper to later versions.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#7
To everyone criticizing this project, you should probably dig a bit to find out what's the context of this project.

From the integuru page:

> We build integrations with platforms lacking official APIs. We specialize in low-latency integrations via reverse-engineering. All integrations are open-source.

So these warnings are probably wasted on someone that is very much aware of what he is doing.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#8

To everyone criticizing this project, you should probably dig a bit to find out what's the context of this project. From the integuru page: > We build integrations with platforms lacking official APIs. We specialize in low-latency integrations via reverse-engineering. All integrations are open-source. So these warnings are probably wasted on someone that is very much aware of what he is doing.

I looked at the website before commenting just to be sure. Judging from the quality of the design (which, yes, I think is an appropriate way to arrive at this conclusion), I would not be surprised to find out that this is a couple recent college grads who don’t realize what this business entails.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#9
post #8

To everyone criticizing this project, you should probably dig a bit to find out what's the context of this project. From the integuru page: > We build integrations with platforms lacking official APIs. We specialize in low-latency integrations via reverse-engineering. All integrations are open-source. So these warnings are probably wasted on someone that is very much aware of what he is doing.

I looked at the website before commenting just to be sure. Judging from the quality of the design (which, yes, I think is an appropriate way to arrive at this conclusion), I would not be surprised to find out that this is a couple recent college grads who don’t realize what this business entails.

They claim it's a project by these people, who are YC-backed: https://www.taiki.ai/

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#10
post #8

To everyone criticizing this project, you should probably dig a bit to find out what's the context of this project. From the integuru page: > We build integrations with platforms lacking official APIs. We specialize in low-latency integrations via reverse-engineering. All integrations are open-source. So these warnings are probably wasted on someone that is very much aware of what he is doing.

I looked at the website before commenting just to be sure. Judging from the quality of the design (which, yes, I think is an appropriate way to arrive at this conclusion), I would not be surprised to find out that this is a couple recent college grads who don’t realize what this business entails.

> I would not be surprised to find out that this is a couple recent college grads who don’t realize what this business entails.

It's made by Y-combinator backed startup Taiki. The cofounders (who have names similar to the ones that made commits in the git repo) seem to be pretty experienced (Alibaba, and Amazon)[0]

[0] https://www.taiki.ai/about-us

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