Rapid API report: The ‘surge’ towards monetisation

APIs are everywhere.

As we know, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) – the ‘glue’ bond that works to connect applications to applications… and application components to services, sub-components, entire operating systems or other defined compartmentalised compute functions – are today forming the neural interlacing layer that we now regard as the modern web-based cloud-native world of computing.

Given this stark reality, can we stand back and ask what the real state of APIs is today?

API hub specialist Rapid thinks we can – the company specialises in enabling developers and enterprises to build, consume and manage APIs.

Rapid’s 4th annual State of APIs Report is intended to highlight trends in software development and API usage. 

The report draws opinions from 850 professional developers and other related engineers and suggests that as many as 63% of developers [Ed: come on guys, round it up to two-thirds] are relying more on APIs in 2022 than in the previous year. 

It also pointed out that the telecommunications, technology and financial services sectors expect to utilise more APIs in 2023.

“This year’s report reaffirms that the market has shifted to where businesses focused on digital transformation now need to be API businesses in order to thrive,” said Iddo Gino, CEO and founder, Rapid. “Many organisations rely on their developers for technologies that will help them stay competitive in today’s economy and in turn the developers are increasingly leveraging APIs for speed and operational efficiency.”

Because APIs make it easy to adjust, transform, enrich and consume data and more than 75% of developers are prioritising participating in the API economy or plan to prioritise it soon. 

Approximately 70% of respondents expected to use even more APIs in 2023 than last year. The number of APIs grows with an organisation’s size: nearly 40% of the largest companies – those with 10,000+ employees – have more than 250 internal APIs. 

While internal APIs remain the most common API type for developers (75%), more developers are working on partner-facing APIs (49%, up from 44% in 2021) or third-party APIs (54%, up from 49% in 2021). Partner-facing APIs grew nearly 10% in the technology industry.