Notable API products that are shaping the API landscape
Most ride-sharing companies use the Google Maps API in the background. E-commerce stores use APIs to update tracking information on orders and send shipping notifications to their customers. Services such as Shopify are built on a layer further abstracted where sellers don’t have to make API integrations themselves but are offered the Shopify marketplace platform for e-commerce, which comes with nearly all the e-commerce-related integrations pre-built. Shopify integrates with PayPal using APIs, so the seller needs to provide their credentials for Shopify to connect with a PayPal account for their Shopify store.
These are some prominent API-first companies:
- Twilio
- Printful
- Tealium
- Plaid
- IMDB
- Amazon Selling Partner API
- Postman
- Marqeta
Let’s take a look at each one of them and see how they position and support their products.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that enables developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs. Twilio has revolutionize authentication, two-factor authentication (2FA), as more users know what SMS and email codes are. Twilio has had a significant impact on the API industry by making it easy for developers to integrate communication functionality into their applications without having to build and maintain the underlying infrastructure. This has led to the creation of a wide variety of innovative communication-enabled apps and services. Additionally, Twilio’s pay-as-you-go pricing model has made it accessible to small and large businesses alike.
Twilio uses web service APIs for programmable communication, such as making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication operations. Twilio’s API offerings across SMS, WhatsApp, voice, video, and email provide the building blocks to design highly customized and sophisticated customer interaction workflows. More than a million developers use Twilio, along with countless large brands.
Twilio’s voice and video APIs were instrumental in enabling developers to build video applications that supported thousands of businesses that came online during the pandemic. The healthcare industry benefited the most by building secure voice and video applications to serve the community.
User verification is one of Twilio’s most comprehensive services. Businesses can use SMS codes and programmable voice flows to verify user’s identity.
Before Twilio disrupted contact center technology, most companies were using custom-built software that was hard to scale and maintain. Twilio is more advanced in contact centers compared to other domains in the same niche. It enables moving offline contact centers to the cloud quickly, all with built-in security, fraud prevention, 24/7 uptime, and so on.
Twilio is a favorite among the developer community, as it has one of the best-designed developer experiences. It has invested heavily in building a community that is innovative and engaged.
Printful
Printful is an innovative service that brings custom merchandise printing and embroidery to the masses. Printful has integrations with website-building platforms such as Shopify and Wix, where artists can upload their artwork to be printed on T-shirts, hats, socks, jackets, stickers, and more. The Printful APIs create and push them to Shopify. When a customer makes an order, Printful will automatically print and ship the product that the artist designed on its platform. Printful will also update shipping information passed on to Shopify via APIs. Shopify sends order tracking updates to customers using email templates. This integration makes it easy for thousands of artists to make money from their art, make it available all over the world, and handle large numbers of orders.
Previously, this kind of e-commerce platform was only available to large enterprises, and it took them many years, hundreds of employees, and millions of dollars to build.
Twitter API
The Twitter APIs have allowed several tools to be built on top of Twitter. Twitter APIs enable users to get Twitter data used to construct many sophisticated models, such as stock predictions based on Twitter sentiment analysis, and applications such as election predictions. The Twitter APIs also allow applications to post, retweet, and comment on tweets programmatically. By using these APIs, people have built many engaging Twitter bots, such as the Notion bot, which, when tagged by a user, saves the tweet to the user’s Notion board automatically.
Twitter is also integrated with marketing management tools such as Hubspot, Canva, and so on.
Plaid
Banking and finance are heavily regulated spaces because of the sensitive nature of these organizations’ data. As people start making more and more transactions online, their need to enable payments and connect various applications to banking has created the need for the abstraction of personal information while processing transactions.
Plaid is a FinTech company that establishes communication between applications, users, banks, and credit card providers. For many companies, it is impossible to integrate with the thousands of financial institutions that currently exist. Plaid has enabled these companies to simplify that process by acting as a middleman.
Plaid works without a standalone application and without the end user creating an account with Plaid. Plaid is integrated into other applications. Depending on the app’s requirements, the service may appear as an option to add a bank account or link a different sort of account while you’re using it. You’ll be in Plaid’s connection flow once you’ve been required to enter information, which usually comprises the following steps:
- Choose your financial institution or bank.
- Authenticate bank accounts by entering username and password information.
- The authentication of the provided information takes place.
- Choose which financial accounts you want to link.
- The connection to the selected application or service is now complete.
Plaid verifies ownership of your bank accounts and captures the data points stated in the preceding section when you enter your username and password for those accounts. This data is shared with the application or service you’re using. Services such as Venmo, Chime, Acorns, and Robinhood use Plaid to enable their users to connect their bank accounts with these services with ease.
Plaid provides various pricing options, starting with the free tier, which allows customers to try building and testing the core functionality such as transactions, Auth, balances, investments, and liabilities with up to 100 live items. The pay-as-you-go option offers unlimited items and no contractual minimums. Pay-as-you-go pricing provides customers with a way to provide pricing flexibility to customers. Avoiding contractual minimums allows more customers to try the product and grow their usage as they realize the value of the service. Most enterprises will have a more customized pricing option and work with a salesperson at Plaid to work through contracts.
Tealium
More digital experiences are powered by Tealium iQTM tag management than any other corporate tag management supplier. Tealium iQ is the core of Tealium’s customer data hub. It lets businesses manage and control their customer data and MarTech vendors across the web, mobile, IoT, and connected devices.
Tealium iQ is a feature-rich product with a unique tag management approach. Tags in Tealium iQ use a three-step template: tag configuration, load rules, and data mappings for adding and editing tags. The Tag Marketplace in Tealium is a pre-made tag template library of more than 1,000 tags ready for import. The user interface delivers data in rich dashboards for analytics and interpretation of data.
IMDB
IMDB is the most extensive online movie database, and over the years, it has been home to millions of movie reviews and ratings based on user-generated data. It also catalogs all the cast and crew of movies, TV shows, and more. This rich data can be accessed using IMDB APIs, available only in a paid model with prior approval.
Amazon Selling Partner API
The Amazon Selling Partner API (SP-API) is a service that Amazon offers to developers that lets them use all of the old features of Amazon Market Web Services. This API is updated with features such as a REST-based format and JSON outputs. The API allows you to create applications for your personal Amazon seller account, applications for sellers to authorize and use to help run their Amazon businesses, and applications to be published to the Amazon Marketplace Appstore.
One example of an application built using the Amazon API is camelcamelcamel.com, which tracks and monitors prices for any product specified by a user and notifies the user when the prices drop to the desired value. This service also monitors the prices of products and shows the highest and lowest prices over time.
Postman
Postman is the standard API development tool in the industry. It is used to build, test, catalog, and change APIs. Postman allows users to use APIs in a user-friendly GUI and eliminates the need to write code to work with APIs. Postman also lets users add predefined API calls to a collection that other users can import and share. Postman also supports access to popular web API clients. The AWS documentation for Postman is well laid out and provides a step-by-step guide to creating an API project with it.
The Postman API allows users to access data stored in the Postman account programmatically.
Postman has also built an amazing community of developers through its platform, blogs, and developer evangelist videos, which interact with the developer community and make APIs easy to use.
Marqeta
Marqeta is another notable FinTech API start-up that executed its initial public offering (IPO) in 2021. It is a cloud-based, open API platform that allows consumers to create customized cards. Businesses may use Marqeta to provide their consumers with payment cards without dealing with banks. Marqeta manages the payment technology’s backend, lowering the integration cost for businesses and allowing them to issue cards to their consumers swiftly.
On-demand delivery services such as DoorDash and Uber give new employees payment cards powered by Marqeta that can be used at stores and restaurants to keep up with the rise in orders. Using Marqeta’s APIs, they are able to onboard new workers quickly and use Marqeta’s card servicing to provide their users with a standard experience in terms of being able to report transaction disputes, issue new cards, or report stolen cards.
Marqeta also provides buy now, pay later products that enable services such as Affirm and Klarna to pay their merchants. Corporate credit cards are also starting to be powered by Marqeta APIs for a smooth employee experience. Large financial institutions, such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs Marcus, have begun to use Marqeta to issue virtual cards to their customers because of the easy API integration.
Meanwhile, developers at crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and ShakePay use Marqeta’s APIs to allow customers to convert cryptocurrencies into government-backed fiat currency at the point of sale. Businesses can build their applications using Marqeta’s APIs, where users can sign up for cards. Marqeta has a pricing model that is based on how much you use it and offers complex dispute flows that lower the costs of running cards.