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Marcin
Marcin

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at marcin.codes

Rapid API: Home for your SaaS

It’s incredible how easy you can to make your SaaS these days. We get everything we need for SaaS applications on platforms like Vercel or Netlify out of the box.

That’s great but what about when you are making your product around API. You need to make a dashboard for your application and giving access tokens for API usage. With all these hassles you don’t have time for creating features in your product.

Rapid API advantages

When you are creating a product, it’s important to confront users’ needs. It’s hard to make features that support your customers and at the same time create a platform for managing access to your product.

Rapid API gives you spaces for creating API and then shows it on a special marketplace.

When you add your API, you can define plans and pricing. Add endpoints and define features. Rapid API comes with requests limits:

  • Hard limit — user has defined amount of requests and nothing more
  • Soft limit — user has defined amount of requests and above that need to pay an extra fee

There are more features:

  • Built-in support and announcements
  • API analytics and alerts
  • Transactions

The product stays yours!

It’s not like that you need to give your product to Rapid API and it’s not yours anymore. Rapid API proxy requests to your product API, manage subscription plans, and access to it. You still need to host your API and manage its infrastructure. Rapid API doesn’t have access to your code, only to the server where are you hosting it.

You have all control over your product. You can make changes, add features or remove endpoints. But bear in mind that you should that are using your product with Rapid API.

So, who’s it for?

In my opinion, Rapid API is great for two options:

  • Early product development and focus to provide as much support for the clients as possible. Rapid API can help validate your idea and make a profit for future development.
  • Expanding on the market and gain new users. Rapid API marketplace can help you get new clients.

Even if you are neither of these two, you can try it. It can be a solid market for your product, who knows.

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