I was reviewing the image recognition API from
Moodstocks, for a story on
ProgrammableWeb today, and discovered another API management story I feel should be told. Its a story about bootstrapping your API management using existing free and low cost services.
Before users adopt your API, it can be hard to justify costs around using paid API management services to support your developer ecosystem (because at that stage the ecosystem often doesn't exist). Moodstocks approach to its API community was a great example of bootstrapping API management until you can afford more.
For managing its
documentation,
code libraries,
articles and
FAQs, Moodstocks turned to Github for help. Github provides these tools for free, and are great for delivering these API management essentials.
For developer support, Moodstocks uses Vanilla Forums for its
forum, and Campfire for chat support. Moodstocks uses a nicely skinned copy of Wordpress for its
blog, and has a solid social media approach using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.
With this bootstrapped approach, it was up to Moodstocks to deliver its own API processes: rate limiting, security and other reporting features. But when it came to management the startup chose a nice selection of free and low cost services to delivery services to its API community.
