Challenge
Carbonside helps businesses achieve net zero. To this end, Carbonside offers carbon footprint calculation APIs as well as carbon offset APIs. Companies can offset through climate-friendly projects. These projects range from renewable energy initiatives to providing stoves to the world’s poorest nations.
At the beginning of the project, they hesitated between launching their API on a marketplace or creating their own portal.
They first considered Rapid API but did not choose such a marketplace for several reasons:
• Discoverability: It is very difficult to stand out in a sea of poor quality APIs. API Providers struggle to get their APIs discovered.
• Transparency: Companies don’t know who their customers are, as they don’t allow to own the relationship with end users.
• API Analytics: The ones provided by Rapid API are very limited.
That made it very tricky to build, monetize and scale a business on such a platform.
Solution
Mike came across Blobr and thought it could be a perfect match. Instead of spending time and resources to build a great developer portal, they could use the one created by Blobr and focus on what they do best: building their carbon offsetting business as a team.
Key criteria to use Blobr
Blobr provides an inclusive platform and documentation options that make it easy to browse, understand, test and subscribe to API Products.
Carbonside uses a custom unit to invoice clients. Up to 5 tonnes of offsetting is free. Beyond that, invoices are automatically generated and customers are charged.
They needed a platform robust enough to prevent or mitigate attacks on their APIs. Blobr follows the API Security best practices to ensure fair use of APIs (reverse proxy, quotas and limits etc.)
Unlike other platforms and marketplaces, Blobr guarantees that Carbonside maintains the relationship with its customers.
Blobr puts a lot of effort into its customer service. Carbonside also uses the latest features as soon as they become available and, by giving constructive feedback, shapes the future of Blobr.
Results
APIs represent an important part of Carbonside’s business as they help businesses integrate carbon offsetting directly. The developer portal drives satisfaction and adoption by providing a great onboarding experience for end users.
Because Blobr’s business models are so flexible, Carbonside was able to charge for the APIs based on a custom metric of its choice: by the ton. This speaks to the end users. Also, because they have tiered business models in place, it makes people want to use the APIs.
Analytics help to scale their sales approach: they know who their customers are, who calls their APIs the most, who they should focus on (in which industry among IoT, aviation etc.)
