Very much hear you about the amount of logic contained within API layers. That said, it actually hasn’t come up a lot so far. What we’re finding is that a lot of teams that have complex API-layer logic also end up landing their data in a data warehouse and replicating the API’s data model there. In those cases, we can use that as the source. For those that don’t have a dwh, we do actually support connecting to an API as a source, it just requires a bit more config and it’s less efficient and so we don’t promote it quite as much :).

As far as the tweet goes, there’s a couple points we might disagree with. One of the assumptions made is that the problem is solved by an outsourced third-party. That’s actually exactly what we want to change! We think the problem should be solved by a first-party (the software vendor), and we want to give them the tools to accomplish that. Another assumption in there is that companies who charge for dashboards wouldn’t do this because they’d lose money. If they charge for dashboards, they can also choose to charge for data exports.