APIs are enormously powerful, and the benefits and still only beginning to be grasped by many businesses. There's an entire API economy developing and RapidAPI makes it easy to discover and integrate with hundreds of APIs. For an agency project, we recently began working with the platform in order to help manage and streamline the collection of data from about a dozen different sources.

The RapidAPI Marketplace makes it easy to discover APIs via simple text searches. The results display stats on the overall popularity of the API, as well as the response time and success rate. The quality of the APIs varies and there are more than a few that are not well maintained. For the most part, the top search results are the best quality. It'd be helpful to remove some of the unmaintained APIs to make the results somewhat simpler.

Each API is available in over a dozen coding languages, and a code snipped is automatically generated to make it easy to consume the APIs. Most of the APIs offer a free base plan with upgradable plans that can be paid and managed directly in RapidAPI, though some still require a separate account with the third party API vendor.

For our own project, RapidAPI has made it much easier to manage a number of API calls. The marketplace has revealed some intriguing new options, and the fact that the APIs can be implemented so easily makes it much more enticing to try new solutions. It's a platform that is sure to grow as more businesses adapt to the API economy.