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Are there any open APIs left?

· 21 comments · 600 words · Viewed ~1,173 times

One of the dreams of Web 2.0 was that website would speak unto website. An "Application Programming Interface" (API) would give programmatic access to structured data, allowing services to seamlessly integrate content from each other. Users would be able to quickly grab data from multiple sources and use them for their own purposes. No registration or API keys, no tedious EULAs or meetings. Just pure synergy!

Is that dream dead? If so, what killed it?

A decade ago, I posted a plea looking for Easy APIs Without Authentication with a follow up post two years later. I wanted some resources that students could use with minimal fuss. Are any of the APIs from 10 years ago still alive?

Alive

These ones are still around:

Dead

These have shuffled off this mortal coil:

  • BBC Radio 1 - No.
  • Twitter URL statistics - LOLSOB No.
  • Star Wars API - No.
  • British National Bibliography - No. Dead due, I think to the British Library's cyber attack.
  • Football Data - gone.

API Key Required

These are still alive, but you either need to pay or register to use them:

What Happened?

Something something … enshittification … blah blah … zero interest rate phenomenon … yadda yadda our incredible journey …

But back in the land of rationality, I've had a lots of experiences running APIs and helping people who run them. The closure and lockdown of APIs usually comes down to one or more of the following.

APIs cost money to run. Yes, even the static ones have a non-zero cost. That's fine if you're prepared to endless subsidise them - but it is hard to justify if there's no return on investment. Anyway, who is using all this bandwidth? Which leads on to:

Lack of analytics. Yes, I know tracking is the devil, but it is hard to build a service if you don't know who is using it. Sure, you can see traffic, but you can't tell if it is useful to the end consumer, or what value you can share. There's no way to communicate with an anonymous consumer. Which, of course, takes us to the next barrier:

Communication is key. If you need to change your API, there's no way to tell users that a change is coming. That might be the announcement of a deprecation, an outage, or an enhancement. You can try smuggling error messages into your responses and hoping someone notices a failing service somewhere - but it's much easier to email everyone who has an API key. And you know what else keys are good for?

Stopping abuse. It'd be nice if everyone played nice online; but some people are raging arseholes. Being able to throttle bad actors (figuratively or literally) is a desirable feature. On a resource constrained service, you sometimes have to put rules in place.

Still, if you know of any good open APIs which don't require registration, and that you think will survive until 2036, please drop a link in the comments.

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21 thoughts on “Are there any open APIs left?”

  7. You forgot to mention the ludicrous pricing on the X API!

    I'm sad that the Marvel API went away. That was fun to play with.

    Reply

  8. ... I'll also point out, because I was there, that "Twitter URL statistics" was never a supported, intended-for-broad use, API - iit was made for the first-party embeds, it lived in an entirely different part of the backend with a different address to the rest of the official API. It's always tricky with web-facing stuff where data can be broadly accessed, whether or not something should have an expectation of support or a longer lifespan.

    Web 2.0 days were fun times!

    Reply

  9. @Edent GOV.UK's APIs are still open (with no API keys required), but they were very much feeling all of the pain points you mention - particularly not being able to communicate with users, and not having a good way to deal with abuse.

    If I was making recommendations now, I'd say have an anonymous free tier, but with strict rate limits and a disclaimer that you should expect breaking changes with no warning. People that want higher limits and better stability should have to authenticate.

    Reply | Reply to original comment on hachyderm.io

  11. Here's my 2p worth:

    • CrossRef Metadata API - no sign-up required, given its infrastructural role I reckon it'll be around to 2036.
    • OSM Overpass API - no sign-up required. Reasonably certain this will be around for a long while too
    • Postcodes.io - no sign-up required
    • Discogs API - reckon this will be around as long as MusicBrainz. No auth required for at least some of the API, needs OAuth if you're doing user related stuff

    Reply

  13. @Edent GitHub is worth a mention - a thing I really care about is open CORS headers, so that I can hit the API from my own client-side JavaScript - and GitHub serve *every public static file on the site* with open CORS headers via their CDN, including content in Gists

    The GitHub API itself works without authentication for a lot of things, albeit with IP rate limiting

    Reply | Reply to original comment on fedi.simonwillison.net

  20. Just a note that Open Notify is only half alive. One of the upstream (NASA?) data sources changed and the pass prediction API is no longer functional. Credit to Nathan for keeping it alive as long as he did, and for keeping the current location API alive now.

    Reply

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