Edit: Thank you for all of your answers. I feel I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. Hope to see y’all on the other side of this.
In: 241
An API subscription is like a ticket that lets you use someone else’s software or service. For example, if you want to watch a movie on Netflix, you need a Netflix subscription. That subscription gives you access to Netflix’s software and movies.
If you want to order food from an app, the app uses an API to talk to the restaurant’s software and place your order.
You maybe use a Webbrowser to access Reddit.com. In that case, the server returns all the data along with information about how to display that data. And there’s lots of separate requests happening on a single page (what posts to show, is the user logged in, does the user have messages, etc).
If I wanted to make an app that serves the same purpose, I could have it act as a Webbrowser, ignore the formatting things, and just display the data how I want it displayed. But that would be tedious to program and inefficient to run.
So, instead, some code functions are made available so that it’s easier and better to make applications that interface with the main program.
Let’s assume fortune tellers for real have access to the future. But you can only ask them certain questions. ‘What is the winning lotto number for Thursday draw?’ ‘Give me a list of 5 stocks that will outperform tomorrow COB?’
Those questions are like your API
API stands for Application Programming Interface. What is an interface? It’s something that allows communication between two things. Your phone screen is an interface between you and your phone.
An API is an interface between an app and some outside piece of code. It allows programmers to access data from the app with code and use it for their own projects. For example, if I’m creating a music listening app, one feature I might want to add is to let people import songs straight from their SoundCloud account. In order to do that, I’d have to use the SoundCloud API to get data about the songs from the SoundCloud app.
The way most API’s work is the company who makes the app sets up a specific URL that programmers can send requests to over the internet. The app then responds to any requests it receives as long as they’re valid.
Many API’s are totally free to use; this can be a good choice as a company if you want to encourage programmers to integrate their apps with yours. However, some API’s require a subscription to use, just like you’d pay a subscription for Netflix or some other service. This is often the case when the API is providing some kind of service to programmers like hosting files or running computations, (for example, the ChatGPT API provides the service of running an AI model) rather than just access to data.
You pay someone for access to a computer. This computer lets you access a product on many computers on their side more easily for your code in a computer readable form. How much you pay can be decided through how much you access said product on their computer.
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