Rapid’s marketplace for every API
Welcome to GET PUT POST, a newsletter all about APIs. Each edition features an interview with a startup about their API and ideas for developers to build on their platform.
This edition, I spoke with Iddo Gino, CEO of Rapid. They’re building a marketplace that makes it easy to find and integrate any API into your site or app. Iddo walks me through this “GitHub for APIs” and their recent partnership with Mashape.
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What’s your vision for Rapid API?
The focus at Rapid is helping as many developers as we can to find and connect to APIs.
Developers have been integrating more and more APIs into their code. Instead of repeatedly implementing basics like text messaging or email delivery, developers can utilize APIs already doing that to save time. Additionally, APIs unlock capabilities that weren’t previously available.
In the past, developers, especially in smaller companies, couldn’t implement functions like image recognition, AI, and machine learning functionality in their apps. Now, they simply make an API request. The vision underlying Rapid was to make that process easier. With Rapid, developers can see over 7,500 APIs in one place, find them from their browser easily, and then connect to them with one endpoint.
We merged the Mashape API marketplace into our platform so that all developers could have access to as many APIs as possible. Combined, we have over 370,000 developers on our platform with access to over 7,500 different APIs, which means new possibilities for things like sentiment and image recognition.
How does data flow through the system?
Rapid API functions as a kind of connectivity layer that lets developers to do a lot of cool stuff.
For example, we present a dashboard log for each call so that developers can look at all their API calls, what data they sent, and what data they got back.
Also, we give developers alerts. If they want to be alerted whenever the average response time for an API exceeds 1000 milliseconds — that can be set up in Rapid.
Furthermore, we let developers swap between APIs. So if developers want to swap between the Twilio API and the Plivo API for text messaging, they can define it on the Rapid layer without having to change their code.
Can you highlight some use cases where developers use Rapid?
A common use case involves developers who do machine learning and want to get the highest quality tagged data possible.
For example, if developers wanted to filter for nudity on their website, they could send pictures to an ML API like Clarifai. If the certainty score was under 0.5, they could decide to send it to a human labor API like MTurk or Scale as a backup.
Check out the interview with Scale:
How many people use the API?
We have over 370,000 active developers on the platform. Together they make over 300 billion API calls per month. That’s over 115,000 per second!
Are you seeing any trends in terms of APIs being picked up?
Yes, the fastest growing category is machine learning image recognition APIs. The top trending API is currently the Microsoft Computer Vision API.
What factors contributed to Rapid’s success?
We learned two things as we grew Rapid.
First, some APIs are difficult to connect to. If we simplify that connection process, developers use Rapid. For example, eBay has a powerful API that can list and query items, yet it’s difficult to connect to because eBay uses its own proprietary standards. So we worked with the eBay team to simplify that API on Rapid make it easy to connect. This means that developers looking for the eBay API would rather do it through Rapid.
Second, we learned that once developers make an API request via Rapid, they tend to come back and connect again because they love seeing all their APIs in one place. The average developer consumes 3.7 APIs via Rapid. This is a number that we’ve seen grow over time.
Does Rapid give feedback to others to simplify their APIs?
Because of the sheer size and speed of growth of the API economy, many standards arise quickly. Currently, REST and JSON are state of the art, but other standards are picking up and might become the general standard in a year or two.
It’s hard for API vendors to keep up with changing standards and that’s the nice thing about Rapid API — it’s a middleman or proxy to other APIs. We can take an API, whatever language it’s written in, and effectively translate it into the current standard. It doesn’t matter if the original API is in XML, YAML, whatever — we can expose all those APIs in pure JSON that developers love to use.
Any particular growth tactics that worked well?
One thing that we love doing is helping developers on Stack Overflow. There are usually correlations between an API being difficult to connect to and poor support teams. We check out Stack Overflow continually and if developers reach out to us about a difficult API, we’ll help them connect to it and tell them about Rapid API along the way.
Another thing that we know is helpful is the visual tester. Developers can log in through Rapid and see code snippets from their browser. They don’t need Postman or the command line, they just choose the parameters visually and test the API. Many developers don’t even end up connecting to the API via Rapid, they just use it as a visual tester to experiment with different APIs and compare results.
Have you had any pushback from API platforms?
We’ve built good relationships with many vendors.
Platforms realize that developers are going to connect to more than just their API. It’s like putting their open source code on GitHub, knowing that it’s not the only piece of code that developers will download. They view us as a sort of GitHub for APIs.
Developers are accustomed to going on Rapid and finding great APIs. For vendors, that just means extra traffic and they’re happy with that.
Tell me more about how you route requests.
An advantage of using Rapid is that we provide redundancy when APIs go down. There’s no code changes or redeploying.
For example, even if the S3 API goes down, developers easily switch over to Google Cloud for storage during that downtime. Our larger customers now replicate requests (i.e. they setup Rapid to duplicate the S3 API call to Google Cloud). All their files are backed up in both places and it’s done visually without any coding.
Have you started monetizing?
The cloud version of Rapid is free — anyone can use it at any scale without paying. We also have an enterprise version that can be run on a private cloud or on-premises. We’ve started working with some bigger companies like eBay, Cisco, and Hyatt and offering that solution.
For example, Hyatt uses many APIs, especially for validation. They’re a big company, but they don’t have a huge development team. Thanks to those APIs, they can do things like automatically detect if a review comes from a happy or angry customer (and prioritize negative comments).
Consider the simple process of making a reservation on the Hyatt website. They use a validation API and credit card API to take your payment information. Then, they use emailing and text messaging APIs to send you a confirmation number. That simple process includes about five or six API calls. With Rapid, Hyatt can easily visualize which APIs they’re using and what kind of latency each one creates.
Do you support credit card processing? How do you handle sensitive data?
We have the Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal APIs. It’s definitely a popular category that’s been growing.
We are PCI-compliant. For each API call, we save logs so that developers can view them later to help debug their app. We configure exactly what data is logged and what data isn’t logged. We don’t log things like credit card numbers or any personal information. If developers use an API like Facebook, we don’t log user IDs or usernames. We log data that helps developers debug, but nothing private.
What are some interesting use cases that Rapid API unlocks?
Someone should build this. Let people enter their flight details and automatically get a ride to the airport at just the right time.
Almost all airports in the US have an API to let people know how long the line is at security. Likewise, you can use the Google Flights API to see when a flight leaves and if it’s delayed. Combine this with the Waze API to estimate how long it takes to get to the airport and the Uber API.
Tell me about how you got involved with Mashape.
They have an API gateway that helps enterprises manage internal APIs and built the Mashape marketplace as a proof of concept. It had scaled well into a large community of developers.
We realized that it didn’t make sense for our platforms to be separate because it would lead to two standards and two collections of APIs. We wanted to unify the market and bring all those APIs under one roof.
Now, every developer can use their account either for Rapid or Mashape to log into both platforms. All of the APIs from both platforms will be listed. Moving forward, our biggest focus will be bringing more APIs into the platform and more tools to help developers connect.
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