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by Rinum 3886 days ago
Good idea, but it's difficult to justify building any commercial or mission critical applications that depends on it out of fear that it'll disappear the next day (bought out, given up, network issues, etc.). For that reason I can't see myself using it beyond a hobby app or one off script... even then I probably wouldn't use it.
1 comments

You could say that about any PaaS, SaaS or API. But most of us have to depend on web APIs at some level. Most internet connected apps need some external services or APIs to keep them running properly. Also, because of the nature of some of the APIs, building and maintaining them in-house would not be viable or worth the effort therefor it saves you significant time and money by outsourcing these (that's why APIs for email and SMS etc are so popular)
One of the issues here is that there's no obvious alternative to switch to in most cases. Plus depending on a well-established company like Heroku (Salesforce) or Amazon is different then depending on something brand new.

Not to diminish the work put into this though. It looks great! :)

Well we all have to start somewhere! =) Plus we already have loads of happy customers that have been using some of our older APIs for more than a year now. Further to this, defensive programming goes a long way when working with APIs (both local and remote APIs). You should design your app in a way that it can continue to function even if an API malfunctions.