One API Key – Third-Party API Integrations with Zero Setup

Hacker News

Share card

One API Key – Third-Party API Integrations with Zero Setup

Hey HN, we’ve been working on a way to simplify authentication with third-party APIs. This started because my co-founder andreterron ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andreterron ) and I both built personal dashboards to track different health and productivity metrics, but it’s such an annoying chore to integrate with new APIs. First you read their docs to learn their authentication method, then build and deploy a custom server to receive OAuth callback requests or deal with CORS, register an app with them, then finally you can send the first request to their API. After the initial integration is done, you now have to refresh expired tokens, make sure that you’re respecting rate limits, and update the code if the underlying API changes. The solution we came up with is a proxy server, it forwards requests to the respective API with up to date auth tokens. Because of this: - Devs can use the full range of capabilities of the underlying APIs. - They don’t have to deal with registering OAuth apps with a ton of providers. - Different API quirks are ironed out. Even if two APIs both use OAuth, there are often annoying differences in how you are required to interact with them. - API Tokens are refreshed automatically if they’re expired. From our conversations with other devs, there’s a lot more we want to add, like custom API providers (If we don’t support an API yet, we don’t want to block you!) and an embed-able auth component that allows your app’s users to connect their third-party accounts. We’ve been really excited about the possibilities of this project for making authenticating with Third-Party APIs a little bit less painful. We’d love your feedback on the idea. What do you think of the concept? What have you built using third-party APIs? Which APIs do you want us to support in the future?