Delegating programming problems to free APIs?
Hi – I want to do something useful with my spare server resources and spare time and I love optimization problems (e.g. making a huge database or a computationally-intensive problem super fast and cheap to operate) so I was wondering:
Did you ever look for an API that would solve a technical problem of yours but decided to build your own solution because the API was too expensive, needlessly hard to use, etc.? I would like to build a free alternative because I can and it's fun 🙂
A few examples that I've already been working on for my projects: IP geolocation, a database of all names in the world, entity extraction from a document or a website, word tagging, ...
One of my side hustles actually started as a free service, but it wasn't necessarily created in response to a higher priced service (which there were at at the time) but to satisfy my need to tackle a technical challenge I personally wanted to solve.
Personally speaking, I have a ton of apprehensions about leveraging free services in my projects, because I don't trust that they will be around for an extended period of time without being funded. Nobody wants a full-time job that doesn't pay them anything, something to think about if your project ends up being successful.
This is very apparent in the open source community where many exceptional projects are dead in the water because the maintainer fell off the planet, usually popping in occasionally to approve a PR and apologize for their lack of time to dedicate to the project.
Some of the things you listed could very well be code libraries and not necessarily stand alone services, may want to just consider rolling them up that way.
I think what people miss a lot of the time is that it's never about price, and always about value. Great, you have services that are free alternatives to things that are already out there, but are they actually better, or just cheaper? If you're adding value outside of the race to the bottom on the cost, that's great, why wouldn't you want to charge /something/ for that?
I guess what I'm getting at is.....
Build better products. Charge appropriately for them.
This is a very good paradigm and I agree with it and use it with my business (some people always complain it's too expensive but what's important is the other group of people who pay and send love letters). Free APIs (or more precisely generous free tiers) would be just the beginning.
Any APIs that you use yourself? :)
Not too many at present. In the past, I've used some geoIP type stuff and still leverage Project Honey Pot's blacklist IP quite frequently. Most of the stuff I use as of late falls more into the services category than straight API.
your response reminds me of this techcrunch article i read today regarding open source http://bit.ly/3bePn6d