DEV Community

Henry Boisdequin
Henry Boisdequin

Posted on • Updated on

10 Fun APIs to Use For Your Next Project

To put it simply: a web API (application programming interface) is a tool which tells a particular system what you want and gives the response back to you. Think of an API as a messenger. As you can imagine, APIs are extremely useful when creating a project. I've curated a list of 10 fun APIs to use for your next project. Let's dive right into it!

1. Exchange Rate API

Exchange Rate API is a free currency conversion tool with over 160 currencies. Some of its pros include: easy to use, global exchange rates, ultra-fast, and accurate conversions.

Project Idea:
Create a website which allows a user to put in a currency and value and have it convert to another currency of a user's choice.

Alt Text

2. DEV API

This is one of my personal favourites. This API is extremely powerful. You can get published articles, post articles, get comments, see users followers, see a user's tags that they follow, and much more.

Project Idea:
Create a website which showcases your articles on dev.to!

Alt Text

3. Spotify API

Like the DEV API, this API is very powerful. With Spotify's API, you can get metadata about music artists, albums, tracks, and user-related data.

Project Idea:
Create a website which can search Spotify with an image of an album cover.

Alt Text

4. YouTube API

The YouTube API is the official API for Google's YouTube. With this API, you can request for YouTube data and embed YouTube videos, the subscribe button, and more.

Project Idea:
Create a website which gives a YouTube video based on what a user searches (search app).

Alt Text

5. Twitter API

The Twitter API is the official API for the Twitter social media app. This API allows you to retrieve and engage with tweets, users, and more.

Project Idea:
Create a Node.js Twitter bot which can post Tweets, follow users, and do more actions on your account.

Alt Text

6. Twilio API

The Twilio API is extremely powerful and can be used for many things. I have personally used it to send messages from my Twilio phone number to another phone number.

Project Idea:
Create a Node.js bot which uses your Twilio phone number to greet your friends via messages when their birthday occurs.

Alt Text

7. Google Maps API

Using Google's Map service API, you can do things from embedding maps in your website to, for example, receiving a set of directions to a specific place.

Project Idea:
Create a restaurant search app which gives the user directions to the nearest restaurant.

Alt Text

8. Edamam API (Recipes)

The Edamam API is an API which gives back recipes for what a user would like to cook.

Project Idea:
Create a website which asks a user for what they would like to eat and returns a recipe on how to make it.

Alt Text

9. Stripe API

The Stripe API is an API which allows users to make payments and send it to your credit card. Its an extremely popular API for any websites which require payments.

Project Idea:
Create an e-commerce site which allows users to pay for goods on the website.

Alt Text

10. Finnhub API (Stock Market)

The Finnhub API allows you to retrieve data from the stock market. This API is trusted by many reputable companies such as Google and Tyson.

Project Idea:
Create an app which provides the latest stock values for the companies in the fortune 500 companies list.

Alt Text

Conclusion

Thanks for reading. I hope that know you know what an API is and some fun APIs to use with your next project! Let me know, in the comments, if you know of any other APIs which would be cool and fun to use.

Henry

Top comments (70)

Collapse
 
liyasthomas profile image
Liyas Thomas

Great collection. Feel free to use hoppscotch.io to spin up these APIs directly from your browser.

GitHub logo hoppscotch / hoppscotch

👽 Open source API development ecosystem https://hoppscotch.io

Collapse
 
drgrey profile image
Dr-Grey

Thank you for sharing, it'll help. I’ve been mostly using postman.

Collapse
 
nnguyenminh profile image
nnguyenminh • Edited

Thanks for recommend, it's useful for us.
I have a question, I call an devto API from website hoppscotch and get blocked by CORS policy, how to solve this issue? Thank you.

Collapse
 
liyasthomas profile image
Liyas Thomas • Edited

You can try turning on Proxy mode from Settings page or you need to install Hoppscotch browser extension (links in readme) to fix CORS issues.

GitHub logo hoppscotch / hoppscotch-extension

Browser extensions to provide more capabilities to https://hoppscotch.io

Thread Thread
 
nnguyenminh profile image
nnguyenminh

Thanks I turned it on but it seems like Proxy has an error. Would you might take a look ?

Thread Thread
 
liyasthomas profile image
Liyas Thomas

Yeah sure. I'll DM. Follow me to text you.

Thread Thread
 
gsdev profile image
gshah2020

i see, to have had the same issue trying to call my localhost apis! The app works so well for my remote servers...would love to resolve the issue

Thread Thread
 
shambu2k profile image
Sidharth Shambu

If you are using a node project just try this out - local-cors-proxy

Collapse
 
tomgrigory profile image
Tom George

@Liyas Thomas
How is it different from Postman or what is your USP?

Collapse
 
liyasthomas profile image
Liyas Thomas • Edited

Hoppscotch is a progressive web app rather than an OS based standalone app. So you can test your APIs directly from your browser window without switching to another application. And can be used on your PC, tablet or even from your smartphone. And the resource consumption is 10x less when compared to a standalone app.

The best part is that whole project and ecosystem is open sourced.

GitHub:

GitHub logo hoppscotch / hoppscotch

👽 Open source API development ecosystem. https://hoppscotch.io

Being a 100% client side application, Hoppscotch can be hosted on any static hosting services or integrated to any internal application by any companies.

Read the story behind Hoppscotch:

Thread Thread
 
shambu2k profile image
Sidharth Shambu

Can we trust this with our key protected APIs ?

Thread Thread
 
liyasthomas profile image
Liyas Thomas

Hoppscotch is 100% open source.
GitHub: github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

The app itself is a client-side application. Nothing ever leave from your browser whatsoever.

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

Hoppscotch is an awesome tool, I use it all the time! Thanks for reading!

Collapse
 
liyasthomas profile image
Liyas Thomas

Thanks 🎉

Thread Thread
 
madza profile image
Madza

Amazing tool, as we all know 👍😉
Tho, what's the inspiration behind that name? 🙄 Sry, just curious 😀😀

Thread Thread
 
liyasthomas profile image
Liyas Thomas

A series of events occurred to came into a conclusion of renaming the project. You can check out my profile for specific articles but do check out this article for reason behind name.

Thread Thread
 
madza profile image
Madza • Edited

It's an alternate spelling of the game "hopscotch", and in my mind is a subtle nod to CS legend Grace Hopper, and implies "hopping" from one endpoint or web location to another.

What a thoughtful idea behind it @ben 🦗👍

Collapse
 
nightwolfdev profile image
nightwolfdev

I also like PokeApi and SWAPI.

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

They sound cool. I will definitely check them out. Thanks for reading!

Collapse
 
alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

Spotify used to have apps within its app that you could develop in HTML+JS with the Spotify API. I submitted an idea for a trivia game that got initial approval, and a Spotify person even helped me get it ready. Still, they rejected the game because the data from the Spotify API was incorrect and could create confusion in the players. They suggested using Spotify's API for album covers and a little more and another music API for the data (dates, names, etc.), making it really tough for a single dev like me to complete the game. In the end, I abandoned the project (luckily for me because Spotify killed the apps shortly after). This was one of the reasons why I slowed down using 3rd party APIs. Unless they improved their data considerably, I would be wary of using the Spotify API.

Collapse
 
alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

Sorry, my comment came out a bit negative.

The post actually looks interesting, and I am curious about trying a couple of the APIs that you mention. Thanks for sharing!

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

Thanks for your insight. Have fun playing with some of the APIs on this list!

Collapse
 
pinheirojose profile image
José Pinheiro

Hi Henry,

First of all, awesome article!
I recently did a project using NASA API, it's just to add to the list :)

It has some cool things you can do and it's free to use!
api.nasa.gov/

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

That’s a great one! Thanks for reading.

Collapse
 
tqbit profile image
tq-bit

I really like the finnhub one, could be a worthy successor to good old yahoo finance.
I'll give that a shot, thanks for the cool idea : ).

Here's one in case you're a Pokemon fan. They have sprites as well, if you want to get visual.
pokeapi.co/

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

I think the Finnhub API is the successor to the Yahoo Finance API. The pokeapi is a classic, a great API. Thanks for reading!

Collapse
 
fluffynuts profile image
Davyd McColl

Thanks! I made currex which is a CLI currency converter between all supported currencies on exchangerate-api.com using the free interface (your own api key is required, but you don't need to pay). I've wanted a CLI currency converter for a while now, so this finally made me do it (:

examples for use: npx currex aud to cad or npx currex 23.99 aud to zar

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

So cool! Thanks for reading!

Collapse
 
imkarthikeyan profile image
Karthikeyan

Well-compiled list.

Found this repo has the list of APIs

github.com/public-apis/public-apis

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

That’s a great resource!

Collapse
 
joshuaalpuerto profile image
Joshua Alpuerto • Edited

FWIW, you can also check this blog 😁

You can also check this public list of API's

Hope this is helpful 😊

Collapse
 
mddanishyusuf profile image
Mohd Danish

public-apis.io is new one.

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

That's a cool one!

Collapse
 
sandordargo profile image
Sandor Dargo

I also like DEV Api, I'm building something around it for the #dohackathon, you might be interested in it:

Collapse
 
hb profile image
Henry Boisdequin

Awesome work! Thanks for reading.

Collapse
 
marcelcruz profile image
Marcel Cruz

Awesome list, thanks for sharing!

In case you're interested, I've put up some free APIs on devresourc.es/tools-and-utilities/..., so feel free to check them out too! :)