Micro APIs for Everyday Use • Hacker News Board

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#11

Post by yNeolh » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

I love the Idea but pricing seems a little... premium for something is "beta".

For example, Cache, a Get is 0.0001$ per request, so, with the initial 5$ you would have 50k Gets that, given the nature of a Cache seems extremely expensive. I guess your highest costs are storing up to 1mb and egress traffic (If you are in a cloud provider) but, even for a side project I could destroy the 5$ by myself developing the project itself.

Other than that, loving it, and I will try to give it a go in the future, and check how the pricing affects my decisions.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#12

Post by asim » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #10

Love this! I'm surprised this hasn't been done before (or it has?) because it sounds so good. The list of APIs cover almost 95% of all project ideas that I want to run on Cloud, so I'm really excited to try this out. The simple pricing structure is excellent as well. Good luck!

Thanks for the positive feedback! What's that 5% you feel is missing? We'd obviously love to build it and make sure we've got everything covered. A couple on my list are a message queue and probably the ability to run apps in a container from a git URL.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#13

Post by harrisonjackson » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

This is neat! A similar set of APIs I've used in the past is API Layer - https://apilayer.com/

The PDF api was really easy to hook into for cleaner receipt attachments in emails.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#14

Post by asim » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

yNeolh wrote: post #11

I love the Idea but pricing seems a little... premium for something is "beta". For example, Cache, a Get is 0.0001$ per request, so, with the initial 5$ you would have 50k Gets that, given the nature of a Cache seems extremely expensive. I guess your highest costs are storing up to 1mb and egress traffic (If you are in a cloud provider) but, even for a side project I could destroy the 5$ by myself developing the proj…

Thanks for the feedback on pricing. Yea we understand the initial cost on some APIs might seem high in aggregate but what you see is what you get. Unlike AWS who bill you in aggregate across storage, egress, etc, we only have one cost - the price per request. So some costs are baked in but we as developers ourselves totally get it and pricing will definitely evolve. Thanks again for the feedback.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#15

Post by asim » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #5

I suppose it's because of the "micro" focus, but it seems odd to me that the table name would be optional in the DB, and that the KV api doesn't have namespaces. The navigation and layout of the site are terrific.

Thanks for that feedback. Optional table name just means you get a default table which is literally called "default". We left out namespace in the kv API just to keep things simple but I'll take that feedback onboard and think about changing it.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#16

Post by Jakobeha » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

I'm probably missing something - some of these APIs I get, but some just seem useless.

Why do I need an API to convert images? Find emojis? Convert "John" to "Hello John"? (ok the helloworld service is just a demo.) I can do that on the client using Javascript.

Moreover, why this instead of something like AWS Lambda, where you code your own service? Instead of prebuilt APIs, why not make it more general?

Don't get me wrong, this seems like a great service and I can see some niche use cases. Also basic APIs for things like database operations and authentication which can actually get pretty complex, and like getting the weather which you can't do yourself. But I can't really see the benefit to some of these APIs, and a custom lambda-style service-creator seems better than a lot of niche APIs and "submit a form if you want your API here".

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#17

Post by TamDenholm » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

Do you have a roadmap for the API's you'll be adding?

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#18

Post by asim » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

Jakobeha wrote: post #16

I'm probably missing something - some of these APIs I get, but some just seem useless. Why do I need an API to convert images? Find emojis? Convert "John" to "Hello John"? (ok the helloworld service is just a demo.) I can do that on the client using Javascript. Moreover, why this instead of something like AWS Lambda, where you code your own service? Instead of prebuilt APIs, why not make it more general? Don't get me…

Thanks for that. It really comes down to the target audience. We have a lot API builder like platforms. In fact this is what Micro was before (https://m3o.dev) but it turns out that's not really what a lot of people want. Those who want to build APIs already know how and tend to pick a cloud of choice to do it on. Otherwise it's really down to reusability of building block APIs we all tend to continually build. What GitHub did for source code we want to do for APIs.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#19

Post by asim » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

TamDenholm wrote: post #17

Do you have a roadmap for the API's you'll be adding?

Hey we don't yet have one to publicly share but will happily put one up if more people are interested with potentially user ranked priority so we get to the most requested ones first.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#20

Post by TamDenholm » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

asim wrote: post #19

TamDenholm wrote: post #17

Do you have a roadmap for the API's you'll be adding?

Hey we don't yet have one to publicly share but will happily put one up if more people are interested with potentially user ranked priority so we get to the most requested ones first.

That would be awesome. :)