[mtlynch]

Thanks for reading!

The big advantages for the customer of a managed API are:

* No costs of installing or upgrading

* It's language independent

I agree that it's lower risk to rely on a library that you have locally, but none of my customers have ever requested that. I do offer a self-hosted plan, and a few customers have inquired about that, but they lose interest when I tell them it costs 10% more than a managed plan.

All of Zestful's commercial competitors are managed APIs as well, so I don't think customers view a locally-installed library as critical.