PROGRAMMING & SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Don’t List Your API on RapidAPI, Never! 😡

I lost $8,872.73 as an API Provider, and RapidAPI threw their hands in the air

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Look. I’m a capable software engineer who wanted to start his side-hustle by developing and monetizing APIs. But naturally, I didn’t want to deal with payment conflicts, platform security, and 24x7 customer support and queries.

I just wanted to build good stuff and earn a little bit extra (like the rest of us).

A few months back, at the request of an unknown Reddit user, I developed a simple product — a “Conversation Starter API”. And as the name suggests, it gives you random conversation openers (in English) when you call the API endpoint (Nothing too complex).

To build this, I created a huge database, which took me some time and mad web-scrapping skills. But at last, the whole thing was finished, and deployed it on AWS.

And then … I “happily” listed it on RapidAPI Platform (like an idiot).

I thought RapidAPI will take care of all the payments and conflicts and security. But little did I know, when my API got abused (DDOS attacked) by the same Reddit user, RapidAPI denied every responsibility to collect my payment (overage fee) from…