Hello everyone,
I am starting a SaaS project that is basically an API hub where you can pay a monthly subscription to use any of APIs listed on the marketplace.
I have been using APIs and publishing APIs on Rapid API for sometime now and found quite a lot of issues with the Rapid API Hub and being an API provider.
The main issues I have had with Rapid API is that it can be difficult to find the APIs that are lesser known and are designed to solve a more niche problems. Probably one of the biggest issues is that there doesn’t seem to be any form of quality control to what APIs can be on and stay on the platform and find a lot of the APIs listed on the platform tend to be expensive for what they offer.
The ideas I have in an attempt to solve these issues are:
- Having some kind of review process for having an API listed on the marketplace
- Having documentation to be a requirement (This would be apart of the review process)
- Having a single subscription to access all APIs to the platform this would stop users having to subscribe to multiple APIs on the Hub independently and would reduce costs to the users
- Having an easier to use UI making everything more direct and easy to navigate
- Having a required health check endpoint for all APIs on the marketplace to auto remove APIs that are down for X amount of time
- Having a page for discovering APIs in a way that gives the smaller APIs as much of a chance at getting discovered as bigger ones do with mainly giving priority to APIs to show reliability in there uptime and faster response times
How I am thinking of pricing as of now. I am thinking of having a monthly subscription that will give a user x amount of tokens a month and will refill to the same amount every month if they run out of tokens then they can be overcharged for what they use.
Being that getting an API on this hub is more difficult due to having the API providers having produce higher quality APIs I would like to pay the APIs that are listed on the hub using the tokens that users do not use giving all the API a percentage of the unused tokens value that gets divided between everyone.
I feel as this is a good way to fix the problems that Rapid API has I would love to hear the communities ideas on this and hear what you would be happy to pay for something like this and what things you don’t like or think would be a problem.
Thanks to everyone that took the time to read this!
