Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

resteasyapi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#21

Post by f35caleb »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #8

If I were building an API service, I think I would want control over the security around the API and the site doesn't describe in depth how the actual customer's data is secured, just "assign a random token". What domain would this white-label admin interface reside on if a sales/signup page and my actual API endpoints are on my domain for example? Wouldn't customers find it jarring to be going to "myawesomeAPI.com"…

Thank you for the feedback! We're still very early stage right now, and we'll be releasing more specifics around security in the coming days.

RestEasy will operate by forwarding your customer's request to your endpoint, so there will be two keys used to secure the API call. One from your customer to RestEasy, and then one to your service. We'll be doing a detailed writeup on that in the next several weeks.

The domain will be white-labelled, so the API calls will still be going to a subdomain of myawesomeAPI.com

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#22

Post by f35caleb »

obblekk wrote: post #3

Very cool, I've been thinking about the need for a service like this. Does the 22% fee you're charging mean a 22% revenue share of what the customer pays? If so... that's very expensive.

Thanks for the feedback! And yes, we're charging a 22% revenue share, which represents the all-in fee (no additional processing fees on top of it). I hope you'll find the final product worth it :)

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#23

Post by f35caleb »

htrp wrote: post #6

> Pricing > $5/month per organization > 22% fee for paid endpoints > $5/month fee credit How does this work ?

If you set up an account with us to sell your API(s), we'll charge $5/month for the account. If you don't make any sales, then the most you'll ever pay out of pocket is the $5.

Once you start making revenue, you'll get a $5 credit towards the revenue share each month. In other words, it ends up being the greater of $5 or 22% of total revenue. Hope that helps!

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#24

Post by f35caleb »

icelancer wrote: post #15

Huh. I sell an API as a service and I never thought about middlemen abstracting some parts of it away. Why do people use this? Just curious what the bull case is for this. Totally willing to believe there is one, but failing to figure it out myself.

My cofounder and I started this project to solve issues I had building my own API service. I had built a data API service and then realized I needed a way to service customers. I fell down the rabbit hole of building user onboarding workflows, account recovery, issuing and storing API keys, etc. It ended up being more work than the API itself!

It's the cost of doing business, I suppose. But it was such a pain that I got together with my cofounder and we decided that we should build a company to make that part easier!

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#25

Post by f35caleb »

whalesalad wrote: post #12

Tip: utilize hover effects for hyperlinks.

I appreciate it. We both come from data and backend backgrounds, landing page design isn't exactly our strong suit :). Getting some proper design resources brought in for our marketing page is on my todo list after we finish the product.

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#26

Post by paulclinger »

f35caleb wrote: post #23
htrp wrote: post #6

> Pricing > $5/month per organization > 22% fee for paid endpoints > $5/month fee credit How does this work ?

If you set up an account with us to sell your API(s), we'll charge $5/month for the account. If you don't make any sales, then the most you'll ever pay out of pocket is the $5. Once you start making revenue, you'll get a $5 credit towards the revenue share each month. In other words, it ends up being the greater of $5 or 22% of total revenue. Hope that helps!

I find it easier to read if it's something like "22% with $5 minimum per month".

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#27

Post by conkeisterdoor »

mtlynch wrote: post #5

I sell an API as a service,[0] and I've been using RapidAPI for years. I've never been happy with them. They charge a 20% fee, and then there's another 3-5% fee for payments via PayPal. And they do many small transactions per month, so you pay PayPal's minimum fees over and over, making the total fees about 25-30%. On top of that, their service is terrible. Customer support is rarely helpful, they frequently fail to…

Tangential, but I'm working on a personal recipe manager so I can easily search for my recipes and render them to PDF with a uniform style. But I decided that for v1, the database will just store ingredients as full strings, because I didn't want to write the code to parse them. I may just sign up for your service to do the parsing for me :) Thanks for sharing

Re: Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service

#28

Post by j45 »

mtlynch wrote: post #11
j45 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tying in paddle as merchant of record for all installs shouldn’t be that challenging no? Stripe has connect as well to split but I’m not sure their merchant of record features are as mature.

> Tying in paddle as merchant of record for all installs shouldn’t be that challenging no? It's not that hard, but I'm anticipating like 40 hours of work start to finish to get Paddle set up and write the integration. The one positive thing I'll say about RapidAPI is that they made onboarding easy. They handle all of user signup, payments, etc. and they just forward your API requests from users. The only code I had t…

The clarification about stripe only being MoR in some cases (connect) is a time saver for me.

It’s good to know paddle is that comprehensive to implement. I think there were a few more providers I was looking at for MoR, I can share them if I locate them.

Thanks for taking the time to share it.

Post reply on HN