One of my earliest memories as a kid is walking into the Hamleys toy store. Every floor of that gigantic store was a sea of possibilities – and nowhere was more exciting than the LEGO section. The moment I stepped onto the LEGO floor my mind instantly started racing thinking about the rockets, castles, and huge animals you could build. Even as an “adult”, that feeling has not gone away.
That is the exact same feeling I get today as a developer every time I go on RapidAPI.com. Every API holds a world of opportunity and potential for amazing things to be built. Crazy apps and phenomenal features, just an API call away. We built RapidAPI around that excitement – giving developers their Hamleys and LEGOs – the place to source the best tools for building amazing apps. The phenomenal community around RapidAPI is a signal of just how many great builders out there are as excited as us about everything they can build with APIs.
Traditionally, we always called our platform a Marketplace. A marketplace is where people discover and buy APIs. The storefront. Where API builders transact with API consumers. But over the years, the platform has extended to serve much more than that. People certainly use RapidAPI to buy and sell APIs – but they also use RapidAPI to share API specs with their colleagues and collaborate on API development. Engineering squads use RapidAPI for Teams as a place to share internal APIs. Larger organizations use our Enterprise platform as their internal API nexus.
Across all these use cases developers use RapidAPI for more than just transactions. They use RapidAPI for tutorials about APIs. To showcase spotlights of API use cases. To discuss and ask questions about the API. It is much more than an API Marketplace – it’s an API Hub.
That’s why starting today we are renaming our API Marketplace to API Hub. This isn’t a product change – all the same features you use and love will remain there and paid APIs are still a big part of our platform. However, we see this as a step to formalize our commitment for being the best API discovery and collaboration platform we can be – whether we serve paid public APIs or internal private APIs.
Furthermore, we see this change as a recommitment to the values that have brought us to where we are now – keeping our focus 100% on developer experience and building the best platform in the world for enabling developers to work with APIs.
We are working hard to keep innovating and introducing new ways to make the experience of developing APIs even more seamless for developers (if you have not seen the updates we made recently, definitely check out the hub!). Thank you for being part of this journey with us. And we hope you stay tuned as we continue to introduce new tooling and integrations for your use with all your API projects. 🚀
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