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Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

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Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#11

Post by smashah »

Uehreka wrote: 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…

This is legal. See Teller API. Venmo will most likely lose if they take these devs to court based on precedent.

I don't like this trend of small time OSS devs being berated about legal bullying from megacorps, meanwhile handsomely VC-funded businesses get congratulated with legal help. We should be berating these companies of not releasing the APIs that people want to use!

We're in an age of AI, built atop agents, agents built atop APIs. APIs were the promise of Web 2.0, a promise being ripped away from us more and more by the day by these megacorps.

There should be a SPECIFIC legal funds/OSS unions protecting these Adversarial Interoperability projects and their maintainers from legal threat harassment by megacorps.

Just in the last 2 years we've had multiple near/passed-trillion dollar companies sending legal threats to OSS devs who have to fight them off on their own - one of them 15 years old.

Thank you alanalanlu and richardyhz for this project. Godspeed! And screw Venmo if they dare go after these two maintainers and their project!

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#13

Post by snozolli »

The negativity is shocking. This is HACKER News. Elegant workarounds of limitations are usually celebrated.

IMO, this should be standard procedure. If you don't want to provide the means to build greater things off of your product, expect that others will. It's a bit ironic, given that they're using open source libraries to build their product.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#16

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #14
zitterbewegung wrote: post #5

Fintech and unofficial API are two things I wouldn’t consider using at best and at worst extremely risky and possibly can get you into trouble .

How do you think Plaid worked before banks got onboard with OAuth?

Can confirm. Plaid continues to work this way as well for many banks.

I have heard from someone who worked there that (allegedly) one of the banks had a huge PI leak that was exposed to Plaid customers and (allegedly) nothing was done because Plaid didn't want to disclose their unofficial use.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#17

Post by alanloo »

EvanFisher wrote: post #12

Look awesome! How do you get a bearer token? And did you look into authing transactions for other users?

Good question! You can get the bearer token from the cookies in the browser. We also offer a hosted service where we handle the entire integration (authentication and hosting).

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#18

Post by melody_calling »

Uehreka wrote: 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 be surprised if this was even noticed at all.

It's a third-party client making authentication and data collection requests, just like the hundreds of other credential stuffing toolkits (OpenBullet et al.) that are smashing the Venmo platform 24/7.

The most likely outcome for anyone using this is their account becoming restricted for unusual access patterns by the existing models already in place.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#19

Post by colesantiago »

This is actually dangerous.

This is how you see spammers, scammers and grifters target people with fake bots on most platforms and the producer i.e. Venmo traces it to an SDK and will kill all these unofficial API consumers.

And once captchas are introduced it's over, I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like captchas would be implemented more into websites to stop scrapers for good.

Re: Show HN: Venmo Unofficial API

#20

Post by OptionOfT »

alanloo wrote: post #17
EvanFisher wrote: post #12

Look awesome! How do you get a bearer token? And did you look into authing transactions for other users?

Good question! You can get the bearer token from the cookies in the browser. We also offer a hosted service where we handle the entire integration (authentication and hosting).

Does that imply I need to give you my username and password?
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