Hello gang — some help with some research please! I’m looking for the best stack to run a public API. Like, as a developer, what would make you go: oh, that’s good documentation; oh that’s an auth key designed by someone who knows what they’re doing; this is really straightforward onboarding, etc. Are there any examples of startups doing this in a really great way? Reason being that I had a project slightly blow up on Twitter over the weekend, and I’m thinking about providing a back-end service and kits (so people can make their own kits too). Just assessing options rn. Thank you!

Hello! I saw that tweet and thought it was awesome :-) I’ve been wondering about the same thing lately - the best way to host (and monetize!) an API. Perhaps because I’m not the greatest designer and APIs come more naturally to me, and also because I’ve read the recent posts about LangChain / ReAct and it makes me think that creating APIs for LLM use might be a great business model - like the old saying, you’d be selling shovels in a gold rush, rather than doing the shovelling yourself. Anyway I think perhaps something like https://cloud.google.com/apigee might be good? It seems to me that when creating APIs, the code / logic is easy (and fun, and what you want to concentrate on)… and it’s everything else that’s hard, the admin and ops of authenticating users, rate limiting, stopping abuse, charging users… That’s what Apigee seems to be solving for.

You’re completely right about wanting to do the tedious management bit. I’ll have a look at Apigee, thanks! Do you know what it’s like from a developer perspective, like somebody making use of the API? My platform now seems to be NextJS/Vercel so ideally I’ll find some API management middleware that works really well with that

No idea what it’s like to use, I’ve just started researching! I’ve also just been recommended rapidapi.com and https://www.blobr.io/ - I’ll have a look and report back

I’ve been using rapidapi a bit. From a developer POV, this is very nice to not have to care about authentication much. Rapidapi creates a token for me every-time I “subscribe” to a service. They have a dashboard to test most of the endpoints with real/demo data which I find very compelling. The documentation of specific endpoints seems to depend on how much work the author put into it. I never used as a creator so not sure how it works.

Cloudflare workers are quite amazing IMHO.