Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?

No one wants to pay for APIs. They want to solve headaches, appease their bosses, build cool things. Figure out a problem that a niche group of people have and you're golden. There are people making 6 figures selling CS:GO skin price feeds.

I have a list of problems I want solved. And hopefully they'll be solved by good high quality APIs that have wide adoption.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#5-permanent-softwareplat...

BSD sockets solved communication for everyone in one library that everyone uses. But communication isn't the only problem we have.

Most of the problems listed are solved independently by each software shop, installation and company.

Not many.

Most build an MVP product.

If you’re selling access to data, it’s niche and easily replaced.

A product with corporate and business integrations? Not so easy.

Inexpensive API for maps and navigation. That's the only one I can think right now.

> Besides by doing market research, how can one find out what are API's that people are actually looking for and willing to pay for?

Does asking professionals directly what they're missing count as market research?

Does this post count as market research?

Even without buy/pay get good at offering something people want to use at all. It's harder than it seems. It took many tries for me to get the hang of it, most things people just don't want.

Usually good money in scarping price data and selling to traders. HOWEVER, they will expect a very robust API that goes beyond a hobby project / side-hustle level of polish and robustness.

I'd gladly pay for an eSignature API that has pay-as-you-go pricing or a good entry-level plan. Products like HelloSign or DocuSign have high monthly costs associated with API usage.

I would pay a small amount (maybe $5 AUD per month) for access to an Open Banking API that lets me get the transactions, balances, etc from my accounts. Unfortunately under the current regime for Open Banking in Australia (part of the Consumer Data Right) you need to be an "Accredited Data Receiver" which I completely understand if I am accessing and storing financial data on the behalf of others.

However for my own personal accounts... just let me call the API!

So here is an API we would have paid for, and I assume many still will: A product catalog. They do exist, but they are expensive and aren't not that great.

What we where after and gave up on was an API that would accept an EAN-13 barcode and return product details, images, good descriptions, in multiple language (specifically NOT machine translated) and possible alternative EAN-13 barcodes for the same product.

As a side project to this: An API that will take a list of EAN-13 barcode, a price and a quantity (in stock) and transform it into a number of feeds for various price comparison sites. Again, it exists, but it's expensive, not all that good and it certainly doesn't automatically add product name, descriptions, categories and product attributes.

I think that issue here is, and it's almost bound be the same for most other APIs, it's the data that's interesting. So what data do you have access to that most others don't? My guess is that there aren't any large and interesting dataset that a random person on HN can easily sell, that isn't already readily available.

I pay for the Seeking Alpha API (as hosted by Rapid API) for finclout.io. The problem that I am solving for the app is that if I only get a stub then I can augmnent this stub with additional information including earnings call recordings.

This is a huge value add for my customers.

I would gladly pay for all my appliances to have a local API rather than phoning home and requiring some proprietary blob of smartphone app.

I want you to provide me an API with sane limits so that a) I don't need to spend time scraping your site b) you don't need to serve me superfluous HTML just because I want a bit of data from your site.

In general I might pay for APIs that correlate data from multiple sources into one endpoint.

As an European, with the current energy situation, I might pay for an API that combines weather data, electricity market prices and other factors into a single API that estimates electricity costs.

Or maybe an API that combines ratings from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Letterboxd etc into one call.

I would like an API which provides consumer electricity cost data globally. There is a huge amount of potential for internet connected energy consumers to optimise their usage against carbon emissions and energy costs. Carbon emissions are available for a lot of countries through APIs like https://app.electricitymaps.com/map and https://www.watttime.org/, but consumer energy costs is much harder to find. There are some APIs that give some pricing data for the purposes of comparing suppliers in competitive markets, but few of these give accurate time-of-use costs for energy. https://www.genability.com/signal/ covers the US and a few other markets quite well, but doesn't have complete and global coverage.

More importantly than "finding an API I am willing to pay for" is the reliability behind that API. Building on top of a third-party API requires trust, and once you've done it a couple of times, being able to trust the interface is maybe 90% of the decision-making on which API provider to pick, where the functionality itself is maybe 10% (unless I can self-host the API, of course).

Third-party risk is the biggest problem with APIs. The amount of calls I've been in where a third-party provider tried to sell their API and told me they don't need versioning right now, they will "try to" pre-announce breaking changes, they don't have an SLA or uptime commitment, etc. etc. is way too many. It's so hard to find an API provider that seems to be trustworthy enough to build a product on top of it.

I feel like there's a magic number of salaried positions that need to be tied to an API provider, to ensure it's both dynamic enough to react to generational changes in networking/security/etc. but also slow enough to not keep throwing everything overboard whenever a new framework or middle-manager comes along.

Crime data by location. Many real-estate sites removed their crime maps due to racism, but I think it’s still a valid metric to consider when moving to a new location.

So my lessons here after trying to tackle this market, it's hard. You can look at articles by Rapid and others that list "Top APIs". You can do some customer research by going to places like HN or reddit where people say, "I need an API for this". You can look at existing single purpose APIs in the market for niche use cases like currency conversion, IP data, etc. Or you can try build something and anticipate user needs based on your own. I built M3O.com for this purpose. Ultimately it was supposed to be a two sided market, where backend devs build for frontend devs, but never materialised that way.

I think either catering to your own first need is better than trying to build a thing you might not understand well. The alternative is to just do a poll on a large channel of distribution like a nocode platform where they're dying for a certain dataset.

I am curious as to your phrasing of "besides by doing market research" — market research is the whole point!

Most successful API products in the sense that you're describing share two common characteristics:

1. They are a thin wrapper around some dynamic dataset.

2. The cost to an organization maintaining that dataset is prohibitively large and/or difficult relative to the value they receive from it.

If I were in your shoes, I'd find a niche that I was relatively well-positioned to address (say, Shopify stores, or programmatic SEO — something small enough to have a uniform opinion but large enough such that there are multiple cohorts of individuals willing to pay) and spend time in their forums looking for people complaining about datasets or information they wish they had. The API part is an implementation detail.

Property data records (physical characteristics, ownership chain, zoning, tax assessments, liens, etc) for under $0.10 per API call.

Do one that parse addresses or first name/last name reliably and I'll pay for it.

A geo places API with the actual international ids of those places. There are a lot of geo something APIs but I still cannot find one where I can:

- Ask for all admin1 regions of a country and have all their actual data (like: all states in the US, or all regions in Italy)

- Ask for all admin2 regions in a given admin1 region (all counties in the state of TX, all provinces in the region of Lombardy). As you can already see "US.TX" is an identifier but "IT.Lombardy" is not, it is language dependent and I'm sure there are international identifiers for those but they are lacking in almost all geo something APIs

- Ask for all admin3 in some admin2

- Ask for all admin-whatever on a given ZIP code

- Ask for all ZIP codes in a given admin-something

- Bonus point if it supports i18n and l10n

If anyone knows of one please tell me, I would pay for it right now.

Generative AI models. E.g. Midjourney which is trained on specific image styles. The only problem is you risk getting sued by copyright holders. No idea where that one is going though, we'll have to see how things play out in court.

Why pay when you can scrape for free?

Side note about rapid API, I originally built https://text-generator.io on rapid API but I got 0 customers there, you would think you could just look on rapid API to see the gaps, there wasn't and still isn't a good alternative to text-generator.io on there but that doesn't guarantee anything, market research takes a lot of thought and the product needs constant marketing just like all businesses, I had to launch it as its own website for it to get users, so there's a lot more that goes into it than just building the right API.

I've also had customers scared off or investors not want to invest because it is a plain API platform and not B2C...

To answer the question market research is kind of the only way to know, Google adwords keyword planner and Google trends are quite good, as well as researching the companies in the same space well and what gaps there APIs have.

As an example https://text-generator.io distinguishes itself from OpenAI by including automatic analysis for input links, linked images, documents etc and doing speech to text/self hosting/embedding images, text and code in the same space, so isn't just an API clone