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Micro APIs for Everyday Use

blog.m3o.com

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Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#21

Post by rishav_sharan »

asim wrote: post #14
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.

Likely an unreasonable ask, specially considering that you folks are just starting out - but have you considered adding a free tier for hobbyists and pet projects?

Most of you competitors have some form of free tier and cheapo devs like me would prefer to embrace some complexity over paying upfront for just simple projects. the $5 starting bit is great but is not the same as a limited free tier.

Overall love the idea and wish you all the best. Love the minimalistic/functional UX of the site as well.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#22

Post by 256DEV »

jamestimmins wrote: post #4

I love this, and can immediately see the value. Is there an opportunity for third party developers to add new APIs?

I've actually just gone through the process of integrating my currency API [1] with Micro. I really liked the idea for this service and actually just emailed them asking your exact question! The process was smooth and I was impressed by their clear communication and very responsive development work.

I've been a user of RapidAPI as both an API publisher & consumer and I think I prefer this Micro model instead - API curation, standardized docs etc. etc. RapidAPI can feel like a bit of a free for all and even though it's technically one entity proxying everything it's often felt to me like more of a list of random services than something cohesive. I can definitely see why Micro is describing their service as a sort of AWS of useful APIs.

[1] https://www.exchangerate-api.com

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#23

Post by Jakobeha »

asim wrote: post #18
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. Wha…

Cool, thanks for the response.

Btw, I suggest adding links to https://m3o.dev from https://m3o.com and vice versa. Until your response I didn't see that the former site existed.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#25

Post by asim »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #21
asim wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Likely an unreasonable ask, specially considering that you folks are just starting out - but have you considered adding a free tier for hobbyists and pet projects? Most of you competitors have some form of free tier and cheapo devs like me would prefer to embrace some complexity over paying upfront for just simple projects. the $5 starting bit is great but is not the same as a limited free tier. Overall love the idea…

Free tier was something we've had previously but it became hard to justify because of our third party integrations and what it costs us. It might be something we try figure out in the future. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#27

Post by pault »

adamhp wrote: post #7

Would be cool to have a really lightweight auth service for registering and logging in. Could still be ephemeral on the order of hours. This seems like it would be easy to monetize (if that were desired) by just increasing quotas / limits, or adding certain features to any particular API that made QOL better.

You can find a bunch of these if you search for jam stack resources.

Re: Micro APIs for Everyday Use

#28

Post by rank0 »

This is awesome I will definitely be trying this out later! I have been wanting a service like this in my head for ages. I hate having to sign up for developer accounts for every single api I want to hit. There SHOULD be a general purpose one stop shop where I can pay by request for access to things like weather, stock prices, ephemeral storage...

Some advice - keep it simple! Simplicity and ease of use are big selling points to me. It's very easy to get lost in feature creep.

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