Stop wasting hours on unreliable APIs — here’s what actually helped

While building features, one thing kept slowing everything down — finding APIs that actually work in real projects.

On the surface, a lot of APIs look perfect: clean docs, nice examples, good landing pages.
But once you integrate them, reality hits — inconsistent responses, missing edge cases, outdated docs.

After facing this multiple times, a pattern became clear:
discovering reliable APIs is often harder than building the feature itself.

So instead of relying on random lists or outdated directories, the focus shifted to a few simple things:

checking if the API is actively maintained
testing small calls before committing
looking for real-world usage, not just docs

This also led to building something around this problem — a place where APIs are curated with a focus on actual usability, not just listings.

For example, recently explored:

MockHero → generates realistic test data in a single API call (useful for testing flows quickly)
Meilisearch → fast, typo-tolerant search that just works out of the box

Still early, but the idea is simple:
make it easier for developers to find APIs they can trust and actually use.

Curious — how do you decide if an API is worth integrating or not?