@nikolas and I have spent the last decade working with engineering teams to build and operate SaaS products. What we observed was that our teams spent a lot of energy building small units of functionality that were needed to provide more complex business capabilities. Take for example the HTML to PDF conversion (which in turn was used to generate pdf invoices) functionality, or simple file conversions. Not to mention data related services like fetching country lists, time zones, and other services, like validating VAT, emails etc. This approach led to a lot of effort building and supporting all sorts of capabilities, instead of building what our business actually needed. Even though we used a lot of existing libraries, the work required to integrate and then support on production was significant.
To address this problem, we started using utilities offered as a service. We did some R&D and found service providers that offered currency exchange rates, or PDF conversions as a service. This did indeed relieve some of the pressure, but it resulted in different problems:
- Dealing with multiple subscriptions, with several providers that only offered one or two specific capabilities
- Each of the providers had a specific way to integrate, such as different response standards, different authentication schemes and some did not fit right into our architectural pattern
- On the compliance side, this approach led to data handling and management related questions from security auditors
Seeing that there was no one who was really trying to solve the problem space that we identified, we started ApyHub. :)
What we offer is a growing catalog of software utility APIs that can be consumed as a service by applications. That way, we aim to relieve developers from having to build the capabilities and maintain these utilities, but also reduce the integration efforts - by having uniform integration requirements: REST APIs, JSON payloads and outputs. Users can send inputs either as URLs or files, and they can access output files directly or get a URL to access them.
We want to make it easier for developers to integrate our APIs into their applications without breaking their design standards (e.g by not downloading and re-uploading the files). All utility APIs can be accessed through the tokens / credentials that the developers generate for their application.
We are launching with +35 utility APIs and are planning to grow this number in the near future. Adding more data utilities is one of our next key goals. Over time, we also want to extend and build more sophistication in terms of building workflows, bundling options and other features that will add more sophistication in the way software utilities are discovered, managed and consumed.
Some of our APIs :
-Apy Extract : Text from Webpage: https://apyhub.com/utility/extractor-webpage-text -Apy Generate: Webpage Screenshot: https://apyhub.com/utility/generate-webpage-screenshot -Apy Image Processor : Resize : https://apyhub.com/utility/image-processor-resize -Apy Generation : iCal : https://apyhub.com/utility/generator-ical
We have a free tier, including up to 2M API requests every month.
We are running a special offer for the HN community. Everyone who signs up with the APYHACKER code, will get 500K extra requests.
If you are a developer, we welcome you to try our APIs. We have a free tier + the ability to generate personal tokens that can be used in your local environment for experimentation and testing.
If you need help with anything, if you want to hang out, talk about your projects or share your insights, feel free to join our discord server.
Cheers,
Samuel and Nikolas
