APIs

Third-party APIs worth building on top of.

These are third-party APIs worth building on top of instead of reimplementing the same capability yourself, covering things like search, maps, or data enrichment. Using one means depending on someone else's uptime and pricing, so check rate limits and reliability before it's load-bearing in production. Read the docs for how the free tier scales before you need it to.

Algolia

Hosted search-as-you-type for your app's data. Skip building your own indexing/ranking pipeline and just push records to their index.

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Mapbox

Maps, geocoding, and routing APIs when you need more control (and often lower cost at scale) than embedding Google Maps.

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Rapid

A marketplace of thousands of third-party APIs behind one auth key and billing relationship, formerly RapidAPI. Handy for finding a niche data API without negotiating your own contract.

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Twilio

Send SMS, make calls, or verify phone numbers without touching a telecom carrier directly. The API you reach for the moment "notify the user by text" shows up in a spec.

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