XYZ Menus: monetizing an API as a solo developer

Please introduce yourself and your company.

My name is Dominik and I’m a self taught web developer, who’s been developing for approximately 8 years. I started off as a designer at a digital marketing agency, taught myself to code, moved into a role as a Front-End Developer and as I kept learning. Now I would consider myself a Full Stack Developer.

On the Front-End Side I work with:

  • HTML/CSS (duh) 
  • JavaScript
  • Typescript
  • ReactJs
  • Angular (I prefer react)

On the Back-End Side I work with:

  • NodeJs (preferred in most applications)
  • Python 
  • PHP (least favorite, personally)

I also have a lot of experience with building and managing databases, as well as Dev Ops experience deploying and maintaining various types of Web Applications. I work as freelance developer building large scale web applications, either alone or on a small team to keep development time down.

XYZmenus is less a company, and more of a passion project of mine that I built in my free time. While building an application that needed restaurant menu data, I was frustrated by the lack of options available so I just decided to build my own. The database now contains over 350,000 Restaurant Menus and it also breaks down the menus into individual menu items of which there are over 30 million. 

Please tell us more about XYZ Menus API?

XYZmenus offers 1 API which could be classified as 2. There is the option to view restaurant menus, or the option to search for individual menu items. The search function is very dynamic and provides the ability to search using geo coordinates + search radius, using value matches in specific fields, or a combination of them both.

You can view the documentation here: https://menuapi.xyz/docs

Currently I am using RapidAPI to manage access, you can find the API on rapidAPI here: https://rapidapi.com/restaurantmenus/api/us-restaurant-menus

There is currently 4 pricing tiers:

  1. Basic - $0/Mo - 1000 requests/mo
  2. Pro - $25/Mo - 25,000 requests/mo
  3. Ultra - $100/Mo - 100,000 requests/mo
  4. Mega - $150/Mo - Unlimited Requests

I appreciate the exposure that RapidAPI provides but I’m not too thrilled about their platform, I’m in the process of building my own way to manage access and in that process I’m looking to bring the pricing of my API down.

How are people using your API?

My API is still fairly new and I’m not really sure how people are using my API. That’s one of my issues with the RapidAPI platform, I have tried to reach out to my users using their system and it consistently fails to send. I’d love to learn more about how people use my API, but its been a struggle when I’m unable to contact my users.

If you're using my API, Reach out to me! I'd love to hear about how you're using it.

What are some APIs that your company uses and how are they being used?

Currently everything (except for rapidAPI) is proprietary. I don’t use any outside APIs. I am working building my own API dashboard which will handle payments and authentication. For this I’m using Stripe for payments and Auth0 for account creation, API Dashboard access, and API authentication. This is all being built in my spare time but should be up and running in the next couple of months!

Anything else you would like to add?

This is a passion project of mine and I love to hear feedback and hear how my API is being used. Feel free to reach out to me directly at [email protected] I’d love to hear from you.

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