Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Our mobile phones are a ubiquitous part of our lives, so it’s no surprise that companies find them useful when they want to send us messages from PIN codes to verify our identity to marketing messages to food delivery updates. As more companies (tech and otherwise) want to send us messages, messaging APIs have popped up to make adding this feature as easy and seamless as possible.

What are Messaging APIs?​

Messaging APIs allow companies to automatically or manually send messages to their customers via SMS, MMS, Whatsapp, push notifications, etc. In addition to just sending messages, messaging APIs also offer other services like analytics to help companies understand their users and optimize their messages.

Why are Messaging APIs useful?​

Messaging APIs are useful because they allow companies to reach users at scale in a way that will be noticed. Messages that can cut through the noise of everyday life are very useful in driving business outcomes, e.g. getting a notification about a sale can drive conversion for an e-commerce business. Some common use cases for messaging APIs include:

• Identity verification whether through sending one time passwords to users who forgot their password, PIN codes for two factor authorization, etc. Identity verification helps users conveniently manage their accounts and helps companies avoid fraud.
• Programmable messages whether marketing messages, promotions, notifications (food delivery, flights), etc.
• Conversational messages (e.g. chatbots) for customer support.

The Best Messaging APIs of 2024​

Twilio​

Twilio is the market leader for messaging APIs, powering companies such as Toyota, IBM, and AirBnB. Twilio offers messaging APIs that can do identity verification, programmable messages, and conversational messages as well as other communication services including voice and e-mail. Twilio allows companies to reach consumers in 180+ countries and 1,500+ global mobile network carriers through SMS, MMS, Whatsapp, etc

Infobip​

Infobip’s messaging API works similarly to Twilio’s, offering identity verification, programmable messages, and conversational messages to companies such as Uber, Meta, and Samsung. Infobip is focused more on conversational messaging services and offers a Gen AI powered chatbot. Infobip is a global company and is directly connected to 800 global mobile network carriers.

Retarus​

Retarus provides fax, e-mail, and SMS messaging services for enterprise companies including Adidas and Avis via API. Retarus’ SMS service reaches 99% of all global mobile networks and messages are reliably delivered irrespective of the recipient’s internet connection and even in remote regions where GSM is the only service available.

Sendbird​

Sendbird’s API platform allows companies including Hinge, Redbull, and DHL to build AI powered chatbots and send programmable messages. Sendbird is an omniplatform messaging service, meaning they take a unified and integrated approach to communications that allows companies to engage with their customers across multiple channels seamlessly.

Bird​

Bird offers a messaging API focused on marketing messages and customer support via SMS, MMS, Whatsapp, e-mail etc. Bird’s customers include the New York Times, Facebook, and Zillow. Bird integrates with other systems including Shopify, Stripe, and Salesforce so that messages can be enriched and personalized with data, improving conversion rates.

Attentive​

Attentive focuses on providing hyper-personalized SMS and e-mail messages to customers including Neiman Marcus, Crate & Barrel, and H&M. Attentive is much more focused on serving the marketing needs of retailers and consumer companies than general messaging services like Twilio. Attentive allows companies to collect e-mails and phone numbers through web, social, and in-store channels, dynamically build the right audience to send specific messages to, and trigger messages based on specific user actions.

CM​

CM, similar to Sendbird, is an omnichannel delivery platform with a focus on the marketing, delivery, payments, and ticketing industries. CM’s customers include BMW, Coca Cola, and Domino’s. CM’s platform can send messages via SMS, Whatsapp, voice, and more.

Tubelight​

Tubelight’s messaging API works similarly to Twilio’s, offering identity verification and programmable messages services. Tubelight is focused on the Indian market though it does have relationships with 200+ global mobile network carriers. Tubelight can deliver messages via SMS, MMS, Whatsapp, and RCS.

Textgrid​

Textgrid works similarly to Twilio and offers messaging services in over 190 countries. Textgrid’s main selling point is that they are half of the cost of using Twilio.

Final Thoughts​

If you’re looking to introduce messaging services into your product, then it’s important to choose a provider that serves your needs. Some important things to consider are:

• What use cases do I have for messaging (identity verification vs. marketing vs. delivery, etc)?
• What geographies and carriers do I need access to?
• What level of message customization and targeting do I need?
• Are there other ancillary messaging and communication services I want to provide and do I want to use the same provider?

If I missed a favorite messaging API or you have any request for other API categories / use cases, please let me know at [email protected] and I will add it to the list! If you want to start integrating one of these APIs, you can check out our database of SDKs for Public APIs to help you get started and reduce development time!

HTMX is a trending JavaScript library that enables the construction of modern user interfaces using hypermedia as the engine of application state.

In a nutshell, you can implement a button that replaces the entire button with an HTTP response using HTML attributes:

index.html

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<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]"></script>

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<!-- have a button POST a click via AJAX -->

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<button hx-post="/clicked" hx-swap="outerHTML">

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Click Me

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</button>

If you follow popular web development trends or are a fan of popular developer-focused content creators, you have probably heard about it through Fireship or ThePrimeagen. However, HTMX has brought an absolute whirlwind of controversy with its radically different approach to building user interfaces. Some folks are skeptical, others are excited, and others are just curious.

To analyze how developers truly feel about HTMX, I went to where developers live: Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, and YouTube. I parsed 1,000s of discussions and synthesized my findings in this article, striving to present only thought-provoking opinions.

Business process automation is crucial in today’s fast-paced digital world. Increasingly, businesses need custom products tailored to their specific needs, as well as integrations with their own internal systems or third-party applications. This demand accounts for the rise of workflow builder companies, which allow their customers to automate custom processes to increase efficiency, speed, cost, and reduce human error. In this article, we’ll explore the best workflow builder companies and what they offer.

What are Workflow APIs?​

A workflow builder is a SaaS product which (usually) offers a drag and drop interface that allows for automation of business processes. Users can define a sequence of steps, connected in a graph, which are performed by the software when the workflow is triggered. Workflows can be triggered by any event from the opening of a GitHub pull request, to the arrival of an email, or even just at a certain time every day. Workflow builders typically offer an API which can interact with defined workflows, such as triggering runs, checking their status, or retrieving results.

Why are Workflow APIs useful?​

Workflows allow a variety of different custom business processes to be automated by software, which improves speed, efficiency, and reduces the potential for human error. The drag and drop interfaces of workflow builders allow automation processes to be created with little to no code, giving non-engineers accessibility to create and operate them, and making the processes observable, understandable, and reproducible. Many workflows also offer integration with other systems and applications, allowing any customer to build bespoke applications tailored to their needs.

The Top 8 Workflow Builder APIs of 2024​

Leap AI​

Leap places its emphasis on customizable and adaptive AI-driven workflows. By using Leap AI, customers can create original, engaging SEO-optimized content and personalize outbound messages. With a conventional no-code drag and drop interface, Leap allows for the creation of bespoke AI workflows tailored to your business’ needs. They also offer a large number of app integrations, including Slack, Google search, Twitter, Linkedin, and much more.

Eden AI​

Like Leap, Eden offers workflow authoring focused on AI use cases - in particular, Eden workflows provide the ability to orchestrate multiple AI models in a single workflow. Their tools let users build, deploy, and scale AI workflows, integrating cutting-edge AI Models and LLMs into their automation processes. Eden’s service also includes monitoring and unified billing for all your AI models, and is targeted towards both developers and non-coders alike.

Prefect​

Prefect is marketed towards automation experts - ML and data engineers who want advanced capabilities and tooling to author and deploy workflows. Instead of taking the no-code approach, Prefect workflows are largely authored in Python. Prefect’s advanced features include a control panel software which offers full observability into your workflows, the ability to easily develop locally before bringing workflows to production, custom retry behavior, and sophisticated caching mechanisms. Prefect gives the developer full control over their workflows, boasting freedom from the restriction of DAG (directed acyclic graph) workflows.

n8n​

n8n workflow automation is a source-available self-hostable workflow builder that allows users to build autonomous, multi-step agents. These workflows can integrate with their users’ internal systems as well as 400+ other third-party apps. n8n has advanced AI features, such as an internal chat assistant which can help author and answer questions about workflows. Their workflows can connect with any LLM, including self-hosted models, and the UI is the best of both worlds, letting users switch between a GUI and JavaScript/python code to fit their needs. Because n8n's platform is highly customizable and offers extensive integration capabilities, it is ideal for developers, technical teams, and data engineers looking to automate tasks.

Make​

Make is a platform which provides intuitive visual tools for creating workflows with a drag and drop interface which allows anyone to automate complex tasks without relying on developer resources. In addition, they furnish their platform with thousands of free workflow automation templates, allowing you to jumpstart your workflow creation process. Make has a free tier with no time limit, allowing you to experiment with some of their features for no commitment. Combined with their flexible pricing plans, this makes them ideal for individual users, startups, and small businesses who are looking to optimize quickly without a heavy investment.

Sperta​

Sperta is a workflow automation authoring platform focused on businesses in the fintech and ecommerce space, allowing for the automation of decisions on fraud, credit, compliance, insurance, and more. Sperta has the standard no-code drag and drop interface, plus a custom expression language, autocomplete, data vendor integration, and much more.

Kissflow​

Kissflow is a workflow automation platform marketed towards multiple personas: IT leaders, developers, process owners, and business users. They offer low-code and no-code workflow authoring, pre-built workflow templates, and countless application integrations. The Kissflow platform is designed to be user-friendly and accessible to individuals without extensive technical knowledge, making it appealing to business managers, process owners, team leaders, and HR professionals who want to streamline their processes and automate workflows without relying on IT support or coding expertise.

Pipefy​

Pipefy is a no-code platform for workflow automation focusing on Procurement, HR and IT operations. Pipefy specializes in providing solutions for compliance and governance processes, such as regulatory compliance, quality management, and audit tracking. Like n8n, Pipefy offers advanced AI features - Pipefy AI can generate optimized workflows based on inputs in a chat-style interface. Pipefy also boasts enterprise-grade security, as well as 300 native connectors to ERPs, databases, and more.

Final Thoughts​

If you’re looking to automate processes in your business pipeline, workflow builders offer the ability to author custom flows to increase your business’ efficiency. If I missed a favorite Workflow API or you have any request for other API categories / use cases, please let me know at [email protected] and I will add it to the list! If you want to start integrating one of these APIs, you can check out our database of SDKs for Public APIs to help you get started and reduce development time!

Gaming is the fastest growing and largest industry within media, and it’s not hard to see why. While the cost of creating a movie or TV show has gone up, making a game has never been easier thanks to wide distribution through Steam and the iOS / Play stores and a variety of APIs that allow game makers to offload non-core functionality to third party providers and focus on making fun and engaging games.

On a side note, gaming is one of my passions and Konfig’s first iteration was as a B2B gaming company that delivered our product via API, so I’m pretty familiar with this space!

What are Gaming APIs?​

Gaming APIs help gaming companies create some aspects of their game. Some functionality that gaming APIs can do include:

• Payments
• Live Operations
• Infrastructure
• Analytics
• Crypto and NFT functionality

Why are Gaming APIs useful?​

Modern video games, especially mobile and PC games, have a complicated tech stack due to the nature of their microtransactions, live operated, and massive multiplayer business model. For example, in a traditional single player console game (take for example the first Mario game), Nintendo developed just the game play and then shipped it in a box and sold it at a retailer. Compare that to a modern PC game like League of Legends where even after Riot develops the game, they have to monetize in-game through selling skins and other microtransactions, support thousands of concurrent players in multiplayer mode, and continually support the game through limited time events and new game modes.

Fortunately for game developers, they don’t have to build all of this functionality in-house and can use gaming APIs instead. This brings down the cost of developing a complex video game and also allows developers to spend more time on making a fun and innovative core loop that can draw in users in this highly competitive market.

The Best Gaming APIs of 2024​

Playfab​

Playfab (acquired by Microsoft) provides various backend services for games including multiplayer, live operations, and data and analytics services all through APIs. On the multiplayer side, Playfab offers dynamically scaling multiplayer servers (useful for massive multiplayer online games), matchmaking, and chatting. On the live operations side, Playfab offers a content management system, microtransactions / sales, player inventory and currency management, and A/B testing. On the data side, Playfab offers real-time analytics, raw data hosting, and data management.

Xsolla​

Xsolla offers payment solutions for PC gaming companies (think of it like Stripe for games) through a customizable multi-platform (including Roblox, Steam, etc) UI connected to an API. Xsolla acts as the merchant of record and helps games receive payments from over 200 geographies with instant compliant access to 700+ payment methods and 130+ currencies. Xsolla also helps companies prevent fraudulent transactions, which unfortunately is a common problem in gaming. While mobile gaming companies are forced to use Apple and Google payment rails today, the courts could eventually break this up and make a third party payment solution like Xsolla viable for mobile as well (we used Xsolla at Scopely for the web version of one of our mobile games).

Coda Payments​

Coda Payments offers payment solutions for gaming companies across multiple PC platforms and geographies, similar to Xsolla. Coda Payments does have a slightly different geographic focus than Xsolla, focusing more on large emerging markets. Coda Payments supports 300+ payment methods.

Mod.io​

Mod.io allows games to offer user-generated content (UGC) on PC, console, mobile, and VR via an API. After users upload an accepted mod, Mod.io allows games to host these mods on their website and link it to an in-game UI that allows players to easily and natively access the mods. Mod.io also offers moderation tools to make the mod approval process faster and also analytics tools so game companies can measure the impact of the mods.

Ready Player Me​

Ready Player Me allows players to create a high quality, 3D, customizable avatar starting from a selfie that they can use in your game. Ready Player Me offers thousands of customizable options like hair style and body shape, free assets including clothing and weapons, and hundreds of movements and gestures to bring the avatar to life in your game. By using Ready Player Me, a game developer can easily create custom characters and skins that they can sell or give to players.

Inworld​

Inworld offers a variety of AI-powered services for gaming companies. These include dynamic non-playable characters (NPCs) with advanced cognition, perception, and behavior allowing for more in-depth interactions and an AI-enabled narrative graph that helps game designers write and plot out interactive narratives, character arcs, and decision points. Inworld also offers AI infrastructure to help gaming companies build with AI.

Scenario​

Scenario allows companies to make gaming assets (like a weapon in a game) through generative AI. Scenario takes training data from characters to props to background art and creates custom models based on prompts. After prompting, game designers can manually adjust the output without having to reprompt. Finally, Scenario allows designers to connect these assets to other workflows like their Unity game engine via API.

Stardust​

Stardust focuses on web 3 / crypto gaming companies and allows them to create and manage user custodial wallets and NFTs via an API. Stardust can connect to many of the major blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon, and Binance. Through Stardust, web 3 games can easily onboard users by connecting their existing wallet or creating a new one for them and mint and sell NFTs.

PandaScore​

PandaScore offers esports data from games including League of Legends and Overwatch. By using PandaScore, a developer can build any esport project that requires historical or live data, such as betting on esports. PandaScore has data on 13 games and over 105,000 matches over 6 years.

Beamable​

Beamable offers cloud-based serverless backend services for gaming companies. By using Beamable, game developers can build a game server without needing to run a game server by using simple C# scripting and a Mongo cloud datastore. This saves developer time as they no longer need to deal with building secure networks, load balancers, or CI/CD pipelines. Like Playfab, Beamable also offers tools for managing live operations.

Final Thoughts​

If you’re looking to create a video game, there are a lot of different third party services that can directly integrate into your game via API and massively reduce your development time. If I missed a favorite gaming API or you have any request for other API categories / use cases, please let me know at [email protected] and I will add it to the list! If you want to start integrating one of these APIs, you can check out our database of SDKs for Public APIs to help you get started and reduce development time!

Source: Unsplash

What are News Aggregation APIs?​

News Integration APIs provide access to articles, headlines, and other pieces of content from a variety of sources. While the New York Times provides access to their own content via API, news aggregators will provide access to many sources of news from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Bloomberg via a single API connection.

Why are Universal Brokerage Integration APIs useful?​

Being able to receive and parse through information is useful to both individuals and businesses. From a business perspective, news aggregation APIs help for the following functions:

• Business & Risk intelligence: Companies are able to stay up to date with current events in their industry, regulatory changes, competitor launches and other risk factors
• Sales Intelligence: Companies can stay up to date with what potential customers are doing, helping them decide when might be the right time to approach the prospect and what the right message might be

On the consumer side, news aggregation APIs can also be useful for apps who are looking to provide news updates as part of a broader offering of services. Robinhood is a good example of this where they show financial news relevant to a company on that company’s stock page.

Finally, while news aggregation APIs are generally useful in the same way that other universal APIs are useful (TL; DR: they save developer time writing integration code with multiple sources and data formats), they are also easier to use and more reliable than scraping thousands of news websites yourself.

The Best News Aggregation APIs of 2024​

Newscatcher​

Newscatchers’ API allows companies to access articles from a variety of sources and build customized newsfeed based on 15 filters to help screen out noise. Newscatchers’ scrapers also uses multiple extraction techniques to make sure critical updates aren’t missed, de-duplicate data so you aren’t getting multiple hits for the same article, and allow you to filter results via multiple methods such as entity linking, clustering, and semantic search. Newscatcher also allows you to enrich metadata for each article, which will allow you to better find what you’re looking for when you search via filters or keywords.

Quantexa​

Quantexa’s news API offers a similar offering to Newscatcher, offering access to 90,000 news outlets and 1.3M daily news articles. Quantexa will also translate articles in different languages to a language of your choice. Quantexa’s also uses AI to both enrich the metadata for each article but also to help you search through articles. Quantexa also has a data visualization feature where you can track mentions or articles about a certain topic over time. Finally, Quantexa has a custom report builder that helps business intelligence analysts creating custom reports with commentary, visualization, and more to send to key stakeholders.

Opoint​

Opoint’s API offers a similar offering to Newscatcher with access to articles from over 230,000 global news outlets. Opoint also offers a service to content writers to create a similarity score with other published articles so you can see how unique your content is.

NewsWare​

NewsWare is focused on providing news feeds for investment professionals, especially algorithmic traders. NewsWare specializes in breaking news events that can affect investments, earnings news, broker ratings, SEC filings, economic indicators, FDA announcements, and more. Because of its focus on investment professionals where timing matters, NewsWare focuses on speed and zero-latency.

Final Thoughts​

If you’re looking to introduce news or news analysis into your workflow, then it’s important to choose a provider that serves your needs. Some important things to consider are:

• What coverage of news articles do I need?
• What latency do I need in receiving news?
• What other ancillary products and services do I need for my workflow and do I want them from the same provider?

If I missed a favorite news aggregation API or you have any request for other API categories / use cases, please let me know at [email protected] and I will add it to the list! If you want to start integrating one of these APIs, you can check out our database of SDKs for Public APIs to help you get started and reduce development time!

With the emergence of Generative AI, kick-started by OpenAI with the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022, it didn’t take long for Generative AI to penetrate numerous industries across the globe. Generative AI refers to AI algorithms which can generate media such as text, audio, or video content. A Large Language Model, or LLM, is a type of Generative AI which is trained on a massive corpus of data and can interpret and generate text. As LLMs became more widespread and companies scrambled to utilize their potential, the need arose for tools which help develop, deploy, and maintain LLM applications; this is referred to as LLM Ops. Large growth is projected for LLMs in the coming years, meaning LLM Ops will become an important part of the developer ecosystem for companies wanting to incorporate LLMs into their operations. Many LLM Ops companies offer an API to integrate their services into your company’s workflows.

What are LLM Ops APIs?​

Even before the meteoric rise of LLMs a few years ago, MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) was a familiar term referring to tools which manage the lifecycle of ML applications. LLMOps is the natural successor to MLOps, giving developers instruments to deploy, tune, and monitor LLM applications. LLM Ops APIs give companies a broad suite of tools to evaluate LLM performance, increase observability, orchestrate complex tasks, test accuracy and bias, benchmark, deploy updates, ingest data, and more.

Why are LLM Ops APIs useful?​

LLM Ops APIs are the essential channel for businesses to tap into the potential of Large Language Models. By abstracting the complexities of model deployment and management, these APIs streamline development workflows, enabling rapid prototyping and deployment of Generative AI models for businesses. They also provide a standard interface for accessing a wide range of monitoring and analytics tools, allowing developers to use LLM technologies with minimal overhead. For companies wanting to integrate LLM capabilities into their enterprise, there is no substitute for the essential mechanisms provided by LLM Ops APIs.

The Best LLM Ops APIs of 2024​

Monster API​

Monster API offers a single cost-efficient API abstraction over numerous Generative AI models, allowing developers to easily build ML applications for their business. Monster also provides no-code LLM fine-tuning, deployment, and scaling tools.

Pulze.ai​

Pulze AI boasts a single API that can route between different LLM providers to optimize for maximum quality and minimal cost. The company also offers a suite of management and tuning implements, allowing you to upload data, customize and fine-tune prompts, deploy applications, measure analytics, and benchmark results.

Context.ai​

Context AI’s API focuses on the performance monitoring aspect of LLM Ops, giving developers tools to evaluate and test models for accuracy and bias prior to deployment, then monitor deployments with data-driven analytics from real users to understand and improve user experience in production.

Carbon​

Carbon offers an LLM Ops API primarily focused on ingesting external data into LLM ecosystems. They offer ready-made components and data connectors, allowing easy integration of external unstructured data from a variety of sources, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Sharepoint.

Humanloop​

Humanloop API offers a variety of LLM Ops tools including an evaluation and monitoring suite, fine-tuning and optimization tools, and prompt management. Humanloop also provides a unique collaborative, version-controlled playground to manage and iterate prompts.

Langfuse​

Langfuse API offers a variety of LLM Ops tools for managing the entire lifecycle of LLM applications, including prompt management, tracings, evaluation, and metrics. Langfuse is uniquely open source, and can also be self-hosted or even run locally.

Graphlit​

Similar to Carbon, the primary offering of Graphlit’s API is a powerful data ingestion tool, allowing you to easily connect data from different sources into your LLM applications. The data can come from websites, cloud storage, applications such as Jira and Slack, or be unstructured data such as documents, images, or videos.

DataRobot​

DataRobot boasts a comprehensive platform for building and operating LLM applications. Their API offers data ingestion tools, business application connectors, and native integrations which lets you choose different Gen AI components that best fit your business’s use case, as well as a model deployment and monitoring suite.

OpenPipe​

OpenPipe is a YC startup focused on training, deployment, fine-tuning, and evaluation of LLM models. They also boast flexible custom pricing plans that can slash the cost of a typical deployment.

Autoblocks​

Autoblocks is a platform focused on LLM evaluation: monitoring, testing, debugging, analytics, and other post-deployment tools. Autoblocks has flexible integrations that work with any codebase or tech stack, which avoids locking developers into any particular technology.

Final Thoughts​

If you’re looking to introduce LLM Ops services into your product, then it’s important to choose a provider that serves your needs. Some important things to consider are:

• What kind of tools you are looking for: LLM Ops is a broad term, and different companies focus on different aspects, from data ingestion to model deployment to monitoring and analytics, or all of the above.
• What pricing model fits your use case the best: different companies offer different pricing plans for their services, from per-token plans to completely custom pricing models.
• How rigid is the tech stack: Some services might lock you in to a particular technology or LLM provider, where others might be more flexible.

If I missed a favorite LLM Ops API or you have any request for other API categories / use cases, please let me know at [email protected] and I will add it to the list! If you want to start integrating one of these APIs, you can check out our database of SDKs for Public APIs to help you get started and reduce development time!

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) seemed to explode out of nowhere during COVID, as consumers flushed with cash and with nothing to do made a lot of big ticket purchases online. In the years since, BNPL continued to grow at a healthy clip and is projected to power almost $100 billion of transactions in the US in 2025. If you want to incorporate BNPL into your product, you can easily do it via API!

What are BNPL APIs?​

BNPL allows consumers to pay for their online and in-store purchases in installments. The typical terms are 4 installments charged bi-weekly. So if you purchase a $2,000 laptop, instead of paying $2,000 upfront with cash or a credit card, you can split the purchase into 4 bi-weekly, automated payments of $500 each. A BNPL API allows you to connect your e-commerce app or website to other parts of the payment ecosystem (issuers, processors, networks, etc) and set up and maintain buy now pay later installment plans using the network.

Why are BNPL APIs useful?​

BNPL APIs are useful because they are another option to allow consumers to fund purchases of big ticket items if they don’t have the money to pay for them right now. BNPL can be a better way for customers to pay versus credit cards because certain BNPL plans are interest-free. The downside versus credit cards is that using a BNPL plan means you don’t build your credit score, you don’t get points or other perks, and you have to pay back the purchase in a shorter time period than a credit card if you don’t want to pay interest.

The Best BNPL APIs of 2024​

Afterpay​

Afterpay offers BNPL products to both retailers and consumers. On the retailer side, Afterpay allows businesses to offer BNPL functionality in the checkout flow via an API or pre-built integrations with Shopify, Woo Commerce, Stripe, and more. On the consumer side, Afterpay allows consumers to shop via the Afterpay app and keep track of their purchases and payments. Afterpay has over 1,000 major retailers in their network.

Afterpay was acquired by Block (formerly Square) and can be used anywhere where Square accepts payments in the US and Australia. The company was founded in Australia and is the market leader there.

Affirm​

Affirm works similarly to Afterpay and offers BNPL products to both retailers and consumers. Affirm has an equally large network of retailers compared to Affirm and has an exclusive deal with Amazon and is Shopify’s official BNPL partner.

Affirm was founded in the US and only operates in the US and Canada, but is looking to enter the European market in 2024.

Klarna​

Klarna works similarly to Afterpay and Affirm and offers BNPL products to both retailers and consumers. Klarna was founded in Europe and is by far the largest exclusively BNPL-focused provider in the world in terms of number of users.

Paypal​

Paypal is a large provider of payment services, including BNPL. Paypal’s BNPL solution works similarly to Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna and offers BNPL products to both retailers and consumers. Paypal is the largest BNPL provider in the US.

SplitIt​

SplitIt is a white-label BNPL provider focused on only businesses, including both business to consumer and business to business payments. Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna force retailers to use their branded BNPL option (i.e. Klarna Pay) at checkout while SplitIt is more flexible and allows the retailer to put their own brand name on the BNPL option. By allowing the merchant to keep their own brand, SplitIt claims they have the highest checkout conversion and credit approval rates in the industry. SplitIt powers payments for many large companies, including AliExpress and Google.

NymCard​

NymCard is a provider of white-label payment services including pre-paid cards, multi-currency payments, credit cards, and BNPL. The BNPL portion of their services works similarly to SplitIt.

Acima​

Acima has a slightly different take on the BNPL concept in that they are lease to own. This means that instead of you buying an item from Amazon using BNPL, Acima actually buys the product on your behalf and then leases it to you until you finish making payments. After you finish making lease payments you own the item. Functionally, it works similarly to BNPL in that consumers split payments for purchases into installments without the use of credit, except that Acima has more stringent requirements on who can use the service (must have an active checking account and $750 monthly income) and the lease payments will always end up being more expensive than the interest-free BNPL option. The advantage of using Acima vs. BNPL is that they work with more local merchants and providers of expensive goods (such as tires).

Credova​

Credova works similarly to Afterpay but is specifically focused on BNPL for outdoor gear including hiking, hunting, fishing, and motor and water sports gear.

Aplazame​

Aplazame works similarly to Afterpay. It is based in Spain and is one of the largest BNPL providers in the country.

ZoodPay​

ZoodPay works similarly to Afterpay and is focused on serving 4,000 small and medium sized businesses in Uzbekistan, Lebanon, and Pakistan. The maximum purchase amount for the interest-free plan is US$500 and the maximum for the interest plan is US$2,000.

Final Thoughts​

If you’re looking to introduce BNPL services into your product, then it’s important to choose a provider that serves your needs. Some important things to consider are:

• What types of products do I sell? Different BNPL providers can have different customer bases, so pick the one that has the most customers that you are targeting.
• Do I want to have my own brand on the BNPL checkout page or do I want a third party brand?
• What geography do I operate in?
• Do I want to offer other payment services and if so do I want to have the same provider as my BNPL provider?

If I missed a favorite BNPL API or you have any request for other API categories / use cases, please let me know at [email protected] and I will add it to the list! If you want to start integrating one of these APIs, you can check out our database of SDKs for Public APIs to help you get started and reduce development time!

Exciting news for developers! We're thrilled to introduce Konfig SDKs, a collection of SDKs designed to streamline and enhance your software development process. Konfig SDKs will transform how you integrate external APIs, making your development faster, your code cleaner, and your integrations more robust.

Checkout our SDKs

Why?​

Developers often struggle with the challenges of integrating multiple external APIs. The inconsistencies in documentation, the need for continuous updates, and the tedious task of translating these documents into usable SDKs consume valuable time and resources.

With Konfig, you let us do the tedious work of parsing and translating to SDKs, so you can focus on core business logic.

Features and Benefits​

• Faster Integration with Less Code: Konfig SDKs allow you to integrate APIs swiftly, erasing the need to write boilerplate code.
• Always Up-to-Date: Stay ahead with SDKs that are automatically updated in alignment with API changes.
• Change Notifications: Receive alerts when an API you depend on undergoes changes, ensuring your projects stay up-to-date.
• Unmatched Efficiency: Build software at an accelerated pace, maintain less code, and expand your app's capabilities with more external integrations.

How does it work?​

1. We maintain the highest quality collection of OpenAPI Specifications on the internet. This collection is open and MIT-licensed so you can use it freely.
2. Generate AI-Augmented SDKs from the OpenAPI Specifications in TypeScript, Python, Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, Go, Swift, and Dart. AI helps us ensure that the SDKs feel natural to use and are well-documented.
3. Distribute the SDKs to you through standard package managers

Finally, whenever an SDK is updated, we will notify you.

By signing up, you will receive an access token that grants you access to our SDKs. You can then use the SDKs to integrate the APIs you need into your projects. Then you can add SDKs to your project using your favorite package manager:

Konfig SDKs vs. Universal API Solutions​

Konfig SDKs offer two key advantages over universal API solutions: security and comprehensiveness.

Security​

Universal API solutions introduce potential security concerns for data-sensitive applications. By adding a universal API layer to your infrastructure, you introduce a potential security risk to your data by passing sensitive information through the provider's infrastructure, possibly leaking information in-transit. Konfig SDKs, on the other hand, ensure your data remains secure and private by connecting you directly to the API provider's infrastructure.

Comprehensiveness​

We offer connections to more APIs than universal API solutions. Moreover, we do not prescribe a common data model for all APIs, ensuring you have full access to all of the API's capabilities.

Use Cases​

Konfig SDKs can be used in a variety of scenarios. Here are a few examples:

1. E-commerce Integration: Use Konfig SDKs to integrate with e-commerce platforms and streamline your sales process.
2. Financial Services: Integrate with financial services APIs to manage transactions and accounts.
3. Human Resources: Integrate with human resources APIs to manage employee data and schedules.
4. Sales: Integrate with sales platforms to manage sales, orders, and customer data.
5. Productivity: Use AI to enhance your productivity in your current productivity tools. Integrate with productivity platforms to manage tasks, projects, and documents.

The Future​

At the core of Konfig SDKs is our extensive experience in generating SDKs for REST APIs from OpenAPI specifications. We understand the developer's plight and have crafted Konfig SDKs to alleviate these challenges.

We plan to add more APIs to openapi-examples and further refine Konfig SDKs, ensuring you write and maintain less code.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to transform your development workflow. Sign up below to be among the first to leverage the power of Konfig SDKs.

Start building faster with Konfig SDKs

Sign up for access to Konfig SDKs

If you have a request for an SDK for a particular API, please reach out at [email protected] or join our Discord server.

Universal brokerage APIs are a topic near and dear to my heart. In my last startup, TAI, we wanted to give users key insights into their stock portfolios via our app and then allow them to trade on those insights.To do this, we first looked into becoming a brokerage ourselves but that's a very slow and expensive process. Then we thought about connecting users' existing brokerage accounts to our app but was this even possible? It turns out that it was - enter universal brokerage integration APIs!

What are Universal Brokerage Integration APIs?​

Universal brokerage integration APIs allow you to connect your app or website to multiple brokerage APIs via a single connection.

Why are Universal Brokerage Integration APIs useful?​

On a broader level, universal APIs are useful because they allow a developer to easily connect to many different data sources through a single interface and data model. Using the universal brokerage API as an example, that means that a developer can write code to integrate the single universal API (i.e. Plaid) instead of having to write code to integrate every single broker API (i.e. Fidelity, E-Trade, etc), saving a lot of time. It also means that the format the developer receives the data in from each broker API is standardized, so for example if the developer needs to pull stock tickers from a user's Fidelity and E-Trade account, it won't matter if Fidelity and E-Trade have different key names (i.e. it could be called "symbol" for Fidelity and "ticker" for E-Trade). This reduces code complexity and the risk of bugs. You can learn more about the value of Universal APIs here.

More specifically for universal brokerage APIs, a developer can save development time by using these products if they are looking to:

• Build trading into their app or website without having to become a broker themselves
• Provide an aggregated portfolio view and analytics across a user's investments
• Get information about users' past trades

The Best Universal Brokerage Integration APIs of 2024​

Plaid​

Plaid is the largest universal financial services integration API and provides a wide coverage of institutions from brokers, retirement plan providers, crypto exchanges and more and investment account types. One potential downside of using Plaid is that they only allow read access (i.e. you can only get information from a brokerage account, you can't make any changes like posting a trade) and the data only updates once a day (so if you make a trade, the information won't be reflected until the end of day). Plaid allows you to receive data on stocks, ETFs, crypto, and options.

SnapTrade​

Snaptrade focuses on retail brokerages and offers coverage from 22 companies from Fidelity to Robinhood to Coinbase. Snaptrade allows read and write access (i.e. you can make changes to an account like posting a trade in addition to getting information like holdings data) and the data updates in near real time. Snaptrade allows you to trade stocks, ETFs, crypto, and options.

Sophtron​

Sophtron allows you to connect to 14,000 financial institutions from banks to credit card companies to brokerages to crypto exchanges and receive data. Like Plaid, Sophtron only allows read access and not write access, so your users won't be able to trade. Sophtron is able to offer the widest coverage of financial institutions because they have a sophisticated AI engine that allows them to parse new financial institutions websites and build new integrations without involving a human 95% of the time.

Upvest​

Upvest is a licensed financial broker focused on the European market. While not technically a universal brokerage integration API, Upvest has similar functionality in that it allows you to offer trading and get information about a user's portfolio without having to become a broker yourself. Upvest allows you to trade stocks, ETFs, and crypto. The upside to using Upvest is that if a user doesn't have an account, they can open one using Upvest but the downside is if they have an account at another broker, they would have to move their account to Upvest or open a new one.

Upvest also allows you to open up a savings plan for customers.

Lemon Markets​

Lemon Markets is also a licensed financial broker focused on the European market that allows you to offer account creation and trading and get information about a user's portfolio. Lemon Markets allows you to trade stocks and ETFs and also allows you to open up a savings plan for customers.

ETFmatic​

ETFmatic offers a white-label European robo-advisor API and widget. While technically not a universal brokerage API, ETFmatic allows for a similar functionality. ETFmatic also allows you to offer account creation and trading and get information about a user's portfolio. As a robo-advisor, ETFmatic also offers portfolio management services such as individualized portfolio construction and rebalancing.

Final Thoughts​

If you're looking to introduce financial brokerage services into your app, then it's important to choose a provider that serves your needs. Some important things to consider are:

• What kind of institutional coverage do I need, both in terms of number of banks, brokerages, etc and types of institutions?
• What kind of functionality do I need? Do you need to just receive data or do you also want to trade? Do you want to allow users to create a new account or to connect an existing account?
• How often do I need my user's data to update?
• What geography do I want to operate in?

If I missed a favorite universal brokerage or asset management API or you have any request for other API categories / use cases, please let me know at [email protected] and I will add it to the list! If you want to start integrating one of these APIs, you can check out our database of SDKs for Public APIs to help you get started and reduce development time!

In this changelog, we're excited to announce the release of the revamped Ruby, PHP, and Swift SDKs. We've also made a change to the TypeScript SDKs to use pnpm instead of yarn or npm. This change has improved the reliability and performance of our TypeScript SDKs.

Furthermore, we've made several improvements and fixes to the Konfig's SDKs. These include various bug fixes, better documentation, security vulnerability fixes, and more rigorous testing for PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, TypeScript, and Swift SDKs.

Revamped Ruby, PHP, and Swift SDKs​

We revamped the Ruby, PHP, and Swift SDKs to be more consistent with the quality of our Python and TypeScript SDKs. This includes:

• Improved code quality
• Better test coverage
• Better documentation

In particular, we removed the array of .md files that were generated as documentation and replaced it with the singular README.md file that includes everything you need to know about the SDK. Putting everything on one page makes it easier to navigate and find what you need.

Konfig's TypeScript SDKs now use pnpm​

Based on internal quality assurance and integration tests that we regularly run on our SDKs, we found that pnpm is a better fit for our TypeScript SDKs. It's faster, more reliable, and uses less disk space than npm or yarn. The breaking point for us was concurrency bugs that were not fixable while using yarn. When switching to pnpm, we found that these issues were resolved without special configuration. This change allowed us to fix flaky tests and continually ensure our generator was working as expected.