An API is a set of definitions and protocols that facilitate the creation and integration of application software. It is sometimes seen as a contract between an information provider and an information user, which defines the content requested from the consumer (the call) and the content requested from the producer (the response).
An API product is the content that you share with users. It includes the content of the API you want to share, the limits, documentation and monetization. To create an API product in Blobr, you first need to upload an API on Blobr and from there you can define your products.
We provide the interface so that you can upload your APIs with Swagger 2.0 or OpenAPI 3.0 definitions in Blobr. If you do not have API definition files, we still got you covered!You can manually add different endpoints and document the data included or simply copy paste sample responses. You can as well add your GraphQL API by adding the endpoint manually.
Blobr is the tool to create your branded API portal in a few minutes so you can share your APIs and even sell them. It helps you to manage access to your APIs, document them and sell them. The API portal is configurable from the name, the logo and even the colours. With no-code, we enable anyone to deliver the best API experience to end users.
It helps to improve the user experience with your APIs, increase revenue and get a faster time to market.
Blobr's vision is to foster the use and sharing of data between B2B companies. Our vision is to productize data assets so it becomes easy for business users to share and monetize data. Our goal is to help any company to share their APIs their own way, in a safe & convenient manner. We help anyone, no matter if they are technical or not, to start sharing and monetizing their APIs. The platform is a no-code one that is made simple to enable anyone to start sharing APIs and make money from them!
We have a tiered pricing business model based on the number of calls going through Blobr. There is a plan with different thresholds fitting different needs. You have a free option with up to 100k calls and with most of the features. You can see more details on the pricing page.
To start using Blobr, you need to upload your API and grant Blobr access to the API you want to share. Your API upload must abide by swagger or open API conditions. Once done, you can create API products where you define content, limits, sharing options and monetization.
At Blobr, we have created a build factory with automatic tests executed every day. We push our developments to production only when we have 100% success on the tests. The flow of the production is further tested as it is redirected to pre-production to make additional tests for the new features we release.
In addition, Blobr is based on pure serverless infrastructure relying on AWS gateway with Georedundancy, idempotency. With such an infrastructure in place, we can ensure there will never be downtime which can be higher than 3 seconds "by design".
You can quickly monetize your API with Blobr. You just need to have a Stripe account and log in Blobr with your credentials. Then, we can help you monetize your APIs straight away. For monetizing your API products, you have several options, from subscription models with or without quota to metering and tiered pricing. These options are tied up to API calls. From the checkout and payment to generation of invoices, everything is properly managed through Blobr.
With Blobr your API is documented as per elements included in your API specs. The more information you can get as examples and error messages within your API specs, better your API documentation will be in Blobr. Indeed, with Blobr you can create from your specs, an interactive documentation where users can use and test your API. In addition, with Blobr you can create workflows to guide users about the best sequence of endpoints to implement in order to integrate the API product for the targeted use case.
Blobr can be divided into two parts sitting on different types of infrastructure:
-> Blobr API dashboard and API portal
The API dashboard is used to create API products, monetization, define limits, etc... The API portal is used to display API products and onboard your users. Those interfaces are deployed in one region but are available everywhere in the world. Those interfaces are completely unrelated to the API proxy.
-> Blobr API Proxy
This API proxy manages API accesses. There is geo-redundancy of the API proxy with idempotency. This means that the proxy behaves in the exact same way, whatever the region. AWS checks every 3 seconds among deployed regions which one answers the fastest.
By design, the maximum consequence of an SLA problem would be 3 seconds consecutively as there is a fallback mechanism moving from one API proxy to another in case of a longer response time. The proxy is only based on one function and updates are extensively tested beforehand. In the worst-case scenario, if there are bugs in the Blobr API provider interface, the API proxy is still able to work as per the rules.
You can use your own API authentication flow for your users and customers. At the time you add you API, you can select the option custom for the authentication to detail your own authentication flow.
Then, your customers will have to add in the header the ‘x-blobr-key’ generated for them when calling the API product displayed in the API portal. It means that this API key provided by Blobr needs to be used on top of your existing authentication flow.
With Blobr you can customize the DNS so that the base URL for calling your APIs and the URL of the portal are based on the DNS you choose. You can set up both independently. You have this option on the Blobr dashboard interface to customize the DNS easily. In the Settings section, once selected on the Blobr interface, you need to update your Name Server type records to put in your DNS manager (e.g. Godaddy or other) to validate the delegation.
There are two types for API versioning. On one side is about making breaking changes to your existing API, on the other side is when you make non-breaking changes to your API.
At the moment if you make breaking changes to your API, we advise that you turn your existing products you created before in Blobr to invisibility mode so that they cannot be accessed by new customers anymore. Only the new API products with the changes you made will be accessible by new customers. Old API products will be still usable by existing customers.
We are planning to improve this so you can update your APIs in Blobr and as a cascade will update API products if those are non-breaking changes. If those are breaking changes you will receive alerts about related products impacting your customers.
With Blobr, we want to provide you the possibility to access all features available in the dashboard through an API. This feature is part of our roadmap and high on the priority list.
Other API management solutions have been built by developers for developers. You need to be very technical to use them. On the contrary, at Blobr, we believe external APIs should not be treated as if they were internal APIs. There are solutions like marketplaces to help you share and monetize APIs like Rapidapi but quite often they own the relationship with your customers and ask for a high percentage fee.
We create a latency of about 50 milliseconds per API call in average. For most use cases not tied up to trading data, it has no impact on the final user experience.