It's no secret, APIs are becoming more and more relevant for each software company. It is pretty common that the offering or product of a company is no longer an application, but an API.

Companies have shifted to building APIs, providing the features that would previosly only be available from their web or mobile application through APIs.

Nowadays, we have lot's of specialized API:

• send emails
• send & receive payments
• SSO
• Storage
• Search
• Location, etc

Basically, it's becoming more and more simple to build applications because we might already have lots of our requirements covered by some external API.

This is what I want to explore in this article, and if you like it please follow & gently smash the ❤️ & 🦄 buttons.

Popular APIs

Identity providers & Oauth APIs 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏽

Those are the APIs that help you get registration, access, logins, user management and SSO in an easy way:

• Auth0
• Stormpath
• Amazon Cognito

Email & Marketing APIs 📧

• Twilio
• SendGrid
• Mailchimp
• Clearbit

Payment APIs 💰

• Braintree
• Stripe
• Paypal

Backend as a service (BAAS APIs) 👩‍💻

• Firebase - this API can be used to build apps on top of google backend infrastructure "Firebase gives you functionality like analytics, databases, messaging and crash reporting so you can move quickly and focus on your users."
• AWS Amplify - build apps on top of AWS serverless backend "AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that enables mobile and front-end web developers to build secure, scalable full stack applications, powered by AWS".

Location APIs 🗺️

• Places API - can be used for location searching, details, typeahead location autocomplete
• Directions API

AI APIs 🦾

Those are the APIs that can help you incorporate AI in your projects without requiring you to implement the deep learning algos yourself. Just call some APIs. Very convenient.

• IBM watson - Chatbots 🤖, recommendations, computer vision, fraud detection
• Azure cognitive services - lots of APIs from Text analytics sentiment, Computer vision aka detect things in photos or recognize face emotions
• Google AI Platform - computer vision APIs 👁️, speach to text, recommendations

Search APIs 🔎

Those APIs allow you to do Google-like real time search, partial matching, fuzzy search

• Algolia - index and query your data in realtime - fun fact the React website uses Algolia
• Google Custom Search

Video generation

You can check out synthesia.io a cool service that works for many languages and can generate a video based on a script.

Technical blogs

• DEV.to API
• an example of what you can do - a simple HTTP request to get your DEV.TO articles in your custom blog:

fetch('https://dev.to/api/articles?username=alexandrudanpop')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => console.log(data));

Ok... I should probably stop here... the conclusion is - just in case you need something - you might find a very good API that can do it for you. Welcome to the API economy, where many companies are API first. Enjoy!

What are your favorite API's?

Share what APIs you like or use.

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