this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17926 readers
31 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Greetings,

I am interested in creating a website that offers free APIs for use in various projects. For instance, you could use the API to obtain search results or access the MyIP API. I am open to suggestions for other APIs that would be helpful.

There is only one restriction I will impose, which is a limit on the number of requests per second.

If I proceed with this idea, would you be interested in using it? Please note that any financial support would be voluntary donations (No Stupid Memberships, Credits, or any pay-to-use)

Thank you.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll carry the odd opinion here and say there's actually a way this could be useful. You have to add value to a product to make it worth your time and effort, increase adoption, and make it at least self-sustainable. Find reasons to justify why this should exist. For a start - This could save time on projects where similar data has to be loaded on a page from multiple api endpoints but it doesn't match. - an old example, but one that I fought once - looking up the time zone of a city from one api, then the time offset from UTC from another api, and trying to relate it all together. That meant my functions had to match that data up on the client side because there were imperfect text matches.

As a second example, if you were able to cache or keep record of data from upstream endpoints that often takes a while to gather because they can't/won't, you might offer a performance advantage or datasets which were previously unavailable to a user without monitoring data coming from that API over an extended period of time.

There's more you can do, but that hinges again on what I previously said, find your pitch and solve problems that the others have created and won't fix.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It still sounds like a solution looking for a problem