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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

I read your previous post about Zestful, and this years update, and I just don't understand who would buy this as a hosted API. To me, it sounds like this should be a library, not an API. For every use case that I can think of, having a library would be 100x better than an API.

In my experience, APIs are generally slow, unreliable, and tend to change without notice.

I don't understand what advantage an API has, except making it easier for the developer to charge based on usage.

Do people really buy APIs like this? Am I missing something?

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Software as a service is the solution the market has arrived at for making money from software when piracy is mostly trivial and commonplace. A rentier pricing model means an entreprenur need not negotiate the value of their product up-front; they can continuously adjust price to match demand. Recurring revenue is easier to budget around than inconsistent lump-sum sales.

Finally, an API over a library means the maintainer of said API has an opportunity to harvest data about usage. Perhaps they use this to motivate new features, or perhaps they can monetize this data on the side.

I seriously doubt these decisions have any connection to technical requirements; it's all business.

Thanks for reading!

The big advantages for the customer of a managed API are:

* No costs of installing or upgrading

* It's language independent

I agree that it's lower risk to rely on a library that you have locally, but none of my customers have ever requested that. I do offer a self-hosted plan, and a few customers have inquired about that, but they lose interest when I tell them it costs 10% more than a managed plan.

All of Zestful's commercial competitors are managed APIs as well, so I don't think customers view a locally-installed library as critical.

Zestful uses machine learning, so there could be a fair amount of storage, CPU, and memory requirements that make using a hosted API preferable to a local library. Also, if you read Michael's posts on https://whatgotdone.com you'll see that he is frequently improving the model. With a hosted API, customers benefit from improved accuracy immediately without having to update anything.

"Without having to update anything" seems a bit disingenuous - does this software even work offline, without having to ask for some data from an online server, just to load the front page?

Supporting the business model is a legitimate consideration, amiwrong?

I agree with you entirely, but how would you build a business around a library? It's one of the side effects of the (amazing) open source ecosystem we have these days that installing some kind of paid-for package isn't really that easy. Nor is preventing widespread pirating/reverse engineering of your library if it is successful.

Although it's wildly inefficient, a SAAS offering solves those problems.

I bought this library a few years ago: https://www.libxl.com/purchase.html

I don't know how profitable the business is, but if the problem is popular enough it should be possible to make money?

Also, when you are selling to businesses, piracy isn't that big of an issue.

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