What's Most Important When Picking an API?

#api #survey

Hey all, when you are picking an API, provided it's your choice and money is no option and assuming they all scale well, have great uptime promises, low latency, and no known security issues, which of the following following factors matter most to you? Feel free to add your own.

Fast / easy signup
Time to first hello world
Quickstarts are easy and intuitive
Tutorials
Accompanying tools (like a debugger, a dashboard)
Sandbox environment to playtest before you "buy"
API follows standards / best practices that you recognize
Documentation (thorough and clear)

If you want to add extra thoughts as to why, you get bonus points. :D

Thanks!

Top comments (3)

Sai Sandeep Vaddi • Aug 20 '20

Documentation
Time to first hello world
See if they support the language I use. Don't wanna spend time writing fetch wrappers over their API endpoint urls (If I have to use many endpoints in my project) unless alternatives are no good. Community wrappers always have some problems. Had so many issues with Zendesk API with third-party nodejs wrappers not working.
See how responsive they are fixing bugs/feature reqs if their git repo is available.