Introducing the Revamped RapidAPI

Revamped API Marketplace

We are excited to introduce the new iteration of the RapidAPI API Hub. Based on 3 years of feedback from our developer community and API partners, we believe this release will help developers discover and connect to APIs faster and more easily than before.

At RapidAPI, our mission is to empower developers to create better software by leveraging the power of APIs. APIs – offering encapsulated and reusable functionality that developers can leverage in their applications – help developers accelerate development and create more connected and functional applications. We strive to help developers discover the right APIs, and easily connect to them.

For Discovery, we have introduced a number of new features. Firstly, we have revamped the homepage to organize APIs around collections. Instead of just showing APIs on the homepage in one long list, we now show collections of APIs, organized by use cases and application needs. This will help developers get to the APIs they need faster. Moreover, we now reveal for the first time real performance metrics around APIs, to help developers better understand API performance, especially around up-time and response times. From the homepage/search pages, you can clearly see the statistics of every API, as well as get more information about the endpoints it exposes and it’s billing model.

For Testing and Connecting to APIs, we have totally redesigned the API page to make it easier than ever to make API requests. It is now possible to see sample responses to understand the data returned from the API without making a request to it. It is also easier to see all of the parameters each endpoint exposes.

The RapidAPI platform has been built agile-y over the past 3 years. We started out with less than 100 APIs – all of which were free, and with less than 1,200 endpoints in total. Today we power more than 8,000 APIs (80x) with over 150,000 endpoints (125x). Reaching this scale, it became clear that we required a ground-up redesign and rebuild of RapidAPI. For that reason, we started out with a clean-sheet design and a bottoms-up rebuild of the marketplace, based on technologies built for our current scale & ready to support the next period of growth at RapidAPI.

Key New Features:

API Collections:

The homepage and individual API collection pages consist of combinations of APIs based on use case or industry. Using these developers can quickly discovery and identify the top APIs in a category or a combination of APIs required to build a solution.

Popularity Score and Performance Metrics:

When evaluating APIs, developers trust other developers’ recommendations. RapidAPI’s popularity score provides this information in an up-to-date and objective manner by calculating a score between 0 to 10 based on the number of API calls as well as the number of active users of an API in a sliding time window. Performance metrics further offer an APIs average success rate and average latency, letting developers determine whether an API is fit for their specific use case.

Popover – Quick view

While on the homepage or an API collection page or while looking at search results, a popover provides quick insight including top endpoints, last updated date, pricing model, without having to click into each individual API.

Endpoints Page

The endpoints page has been designed to provide an experience similar to that of popular developer tools to facilitate quick testing of APIs. Sample responses are made available where published by the API provider.

In-product Notifications

Alerts and banner messages provide key notifications in the product.

New Design System

The new marketplace features a design using modern UX paradigms with a developer focused functional and efficient look.

Technical Enhancements

The new marketplace comes with a host of technical enhancements and supporting services, each of which truly deserves its own blog. The highlights are a GraphQL API gateway to query the RapidAPI data graph, a brand new API proxy engine, a new analytics pipeline, a system that builds in localization. The combined effect is a platform that is faster, even more, reliable when handling billions of API calls and further scalable, and the ability to release new functionality and features faster.