How DO you Paywall an API?

In our Slack Community last week, one of our members was looking for a paywall to drop in front of their API, and some interesting replies came in. The first suggestion was to use Stripe; however, this would mean building the developer portal and other tooling yourself. Phil dropped in Zuplo, a solid choice that ticks a lot of boxes. Turns out another member of our community has a startup building exactly this (more details in our community section).

Someone also suggested Fienta, which is a platform for selling tickets, no idea how you use that to gate an API... where there's a will, there's a way, I suppose?

-- Alexander

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The API Roundup

API News, links, and tools from around the web

The Best CORS Middleware Lib in Go?

We all know what CORS is, right? How it works, how to set it up and how to configure the headers? The best CORS lib in Go released version 1.0.0 last week. The best thing about this CORS lib is that it is easy to set up and very hard to misuse. If you're building an API in Go, check it out.

GraphQL Over HTTP

GraphQL has released a draft specification for consuming GraphQL over HTTP. The goal here is to map GraphQL semantics to their HTTP counterparts, leading to better integration with clients and tools. Depending on how it's executed, it might finally address one of GraphQL's main criticisms.

NodeJS Streams

Since Phil's first blog post on streaming data via REST APIs, I've been keeping an eye on Node's new stream-based API. An experimental version has finally landed, but requires a flag to use it: --experimental-stream-iter. This new version of Streams is built on iterators, unlike the current version's class structure.

Hummingbird 2

A recent post on Bluesky said response times for Hummingbird 2 had been reduced by 25%. Great, but what is Hummingbird? After a quick Kagi search, I find it's a Swift server framework. Swift is a beautiful language to code in, and I can't wait to have a play and try to build a few APIs with it.

Docus

A wonderful tool for writing docs with Markdown and Nuxt. Comes with built-in navigation, full text search and internationalisation support. No OpenAPI support yet, unfortunately, but it could be good as your overall doc site with your OpenAPI docs embedded.

Why we replaced Node.js with Bun for 5x throughput

An interesting write-up about how Trigger.dev sped up a service by switching from Node to Bun and found a memory leak in Bun. What caught my eye, though, was the difference between how Node with Fastify or Express handles request-response and how Bun does. Something to watch out for if you move your own Node-powered APIs.

APIs You Won't Hate

Articles written and shared in our free Slack community.

🎙️Stigg: Infrastructure for pricing models with Anton Zagrebelny

This interview is a throwback from a few years ago, but APIs cofounder and pod host Mike Bifulco interviewed Anton Zagrebelny from Stigg About their API Monetization product. Worth a listen if you're thinking about pricing models!

From our Community

Articles written and shared in our free Slack community.

FrontGate

FrontGate is a new startup from Jack Skinner — a Dev Portal in a box for your API. The key feature is that FrontGate does not proxy your API traffic, so you maintain operational separation. Currently in early access, with free sign-up available in a few months.

Thanks so much to our members: Kin, Juxt, Alex R, Nolan S, Brandon K, Frank, James D, Bill D, and Abdelhadi D. Your support means the world to us!

✌️ Until next time,
Alexander, Phil & Mike