[HN Gopher] Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service
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Building a starter pack for an API-as-a-Service
Author : f35caleb
Score : 21 points
Date : 2023-11-20 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.resteasyapi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.resteasyapi.com)
| f35caleb wrote:
| I am cofounding a new SaaS "starter pack", but for a very
| specific niche. This product aims to serve as the frontend and
| middleware for anyone planning to launch an API-as-a-Service
| product. The idea for this product is straightforward: once
| you've built an awesome API service and are ready to share it
| with the world, you've only done like 20% of the work. You need
| to build an entire UI so that your customers can create accounts,
| issue API keys, set up billing information, keep track of API
| usage, logging, admin UI's to track all of this, and the list
| goes on...
|
| Our product, which we're calling "RestEasy", is the 'as-a-
| Service' to your API. You're going to be able to stand up a
| completely white-labelled user portal on your own custom URL,
| complete with your own color scheme and logo. We will also
| provide white-labelled admin portals so you can manage your
| users, API keys, pricing, check usage logs, some basic analytics,
| etc.
|
| Check out the homepage and let me know what you think! Are there
| any specific use cases you would want to see covered in the
| platform?
|
| Be sure to sign up for the waitlist. We'll be sending out
| periodic updates along the way to keep you updated on how we're
| doing.
|
| [Website Link](https://www.resteasyapi.com/)
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| So there is no actual functionality to try out right now? From
| what I browsed, the site is essentially a landing page + email
| signup.
| obblekk wrote:
| Very cool, I've been thinking about the need for a service like
| this.
|
| Does the 22% fee you're charging mean a 22% revenue share of what
| the customer pays? If so... that's very expensive.
| GordonS wrote:
| Thus sounded _really_ interesting, right up until I saw 22% -
| that is a lot.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I'm using Deno's SaaSKit for this:
| https://github.com/denoland/saaskit
| mtlynch wrote:
| I sell an API as a service,[0] and I've been using RapidAPI for
| years. I've never been happy with them. They charge a 20% fee,
| and then there's another 3-5% fee for payments via PayPal. And
| they do many small transactions per month, so you pay PayPal's
| minimum fees over and over, making the total fees about 25-30%.
|
| On top of that, their service is terrible. Customer support is
| rarely helpful, they frequently fail to bill my customers and
| just shrug it off, their dashboard takes 20+ seconds to load
| simple views. I could go on and on.
|
| I welcome competitors in this space because I've been surprised
| at how few vendors offer what I'd expect to be not so hard a
| service.
|
| The thing that kills this deal for me is that RestEasy isn't the
| merchant of record, so the API owner still has to figure out how
| to pay taxes in every state/country where they're liable for
| taxes.
|
| The other thing that would make me nervous is that you're a brand
| new company, and you're a point of failure for my API. If
| RestEasy goes down, my service goes down.
|
| RestEasy's site also currently has a lot of typos, which would
| also make me nervous about betting my uptime on this service.
|
| I'm currently in the process of migrating to Paddle. They act as
| merchant of record, and their fees are 5%, though they require me
| to write a lot of my own custom code to integrate with their
| system.
|
| [0] https://zestfuldata.com/
| j45 wrote:
| Tying in paddle as merchant of record for all installs
| shouldn't be that challenging no?
|
| Stripe has connect as well to split but I'm not sure their
| merchant of record features are as mature.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _Tying in paddle as merchant of record for all installs
| shouldn't be that challenging no?_
|
| It's not that hard, but I'm anticipating like 40 hours of
| work start to finish to get Paddle set up and write the
| integration.
|
| The one positive thing I'll say about RapidAPI is that they
| made onboarding easy. They handle all of user signup,
| payments, etc. and they just forward your API requests from
| users. The only code I had to write is a few lines to
| populate a custom HTTP response header to tell RapidAPI how
| many units of my service the request consumed.
|
| Paddle provides a lot less infrastructure, so I still have to
| write my own user signup flow. Paddle offers a JS library
| that does the heavy lifting for user signup, but I still have
| to integrate it with my website. And then they don't have the
| proxy model at all, so users talk directly to my backend, and
| my backend has to check with Paddle to see whether the user
| is valid or not. Then my backend has to both respond to the
| user and send a separate request to Paddle to add to the
| user's bill.
|
| > _Stripe has connect as well to split but I'm not sure their
| merchant of record features are as mature._
|
| I didn't realize Stripe offered MoR at all, but it looks like
| they do now. My reading is that if I were to sell under
| RestEasy, then Stripe would indeed act as my MoR because I'm
| the "third-party seller":
|
| > _Is Stripe a merchant of record?_
|
| > _Stripe is an MoR, but only for its Stripe Connect
| platform. With Stripe Connect, businesses can create
| platforms or marketplaces that process payments for third-
| party sellers. In this case, Stripe serves as the MoR,
| processing payments and assuming the associated
| responsibilities on behalf of the third-party sellers._
|
| > _However, when businesses use Stripe to process payments
| for regular direct transactions, the business itself remains
| the MoR while Stripe acts as a payment processor or payment
| gateway. This means that the business is responsible for
| transactional compliance, tax obligations, and managing
| refunds and chargebacks, while Stripe handles the technical
| aspects of transaction processing._
|
| https://stripe.com/resources/more/merchant-of-record
| htrp wrote:
| > Pricing
|
| > $5/month per organization
|
| > 22% fee for paid endpoints
|
| > $5/month fee credit
|
| How does this work ?
| matt_s wrote:
| If I were building an API service, I think I would want control
| over the security around the API and the site doesn't describe in
| depth how the actual customer's data is secured, just "assign a
| random token".
|
| What domain would this white-label admin interface reside on if a
| sales/signup page and my actual API endpoints are on my domain
| for example? Wouldn't customers find it jarring to be going to
| "myawesomeAPI.com" to signup and then the domain for actual API
| calls ends up on "resteasyapi.com"?
| whalesalad wrote:
| Tip: utilize hover effects for hyperlinks.
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