I was doing some research in the area of harvesting and scraping APs. I was taking another look at Web Scrape Master, a simple scraping API that allows you to pass it a URL and it harvests structured data and content from the page.
The Web Scrape Master is a pretty dead simple API, with a purpose. It does one thing and it does it well. What I found really interesting though, was the fact that lower on the page, below the API documentation the API was for sale. You could buy a copy of the server side of the API and client side tooling as a bundle.
It is a pretty interesting approach, especially for these utility style APIs. You can either use the API provided as a service or you can download, install and use it within your own infrastructure, adding the API to your own stack.
While this isn't possible for all APIs, I think it has promise for many API providers, delivering a sort of on-premise version of their API. I'm getting in the habit of publishing server side code for many of my API designs, I'm will consider some APIs for possible sale in the future as well.
When you think about the growth of containers like Docker and the PaaS solutions like OpenShift, it makes the possibility of rapidly deployment of utility APIs much more of a reality.
