One API to bind them all

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

https://www.facebook.com/officialtolkien/videos/one-ring-to-rule-them-all/500930807838083/

Okay I get that is a rather creepy analogy but it’s idea of ruling your (evil) empire with just one ring versus needing a whole bunch of (evil) rings.

This is me explaining the idea using a video talking about an API which allows you to get quotes for insurance from many different endpoints. See www.briza.com for example.

Here are a couple of these API type products

• https://umnico.com/messaging-api/

• https://www.briza.com/

• https://www.redoxengine.com/ - see Redox

The value proposition is quite similar

Good question.

Anything can work, it really depends on the use case, how well the team behind it has implemented the idea.

Electric cars as attempted early on by General Motors was not successful. The narrative from the environmental industry is the did it through deliberate malice. I always assume incompetence is a better narrative (see Narratives) - at least an inability to execute.

Part of the problem is this:

• Is there a sufficiently large enough group of customers that have the same problem?

• Can this problem be solved such the cost of implementing the solution is LESS THAN the money that group of customers will pay in aggregate to get the problem solved.

There can be problems if there the needs of customers diverge from what the API provider needs.

Say you needed to access a specific feature of Whatsapp and your single API to talk to all social media platforms doesn’t implement that feature?

If this is a bottleneck for the growth of your business then being stuck with the single API becomes a problem.

Going in with eyes wide open.

Recognize that a single API might get you faster to where you need to go initially, but be prepared to educate yourself to go beyond this type of solution to a more open system approach.

Iguana X for instance is a very open system - more effort to learn the system but then you have no bottleneck that you cannot resolve.

Also How do assess a vendor/solution?.