[princevegeta89]

Sorry but APIs aren't meant to be broken at anytime. That's what they are for. That is the unwritten part of the so called contracts/agreements.

I do not understand how the idea of not building a company on the back of another is possible. We rely on other companies for deployments, hosting, reporting, monitoring, payments, billing and security etc. Some may be less critical than others but how can you avoid your reliance on other companies at all?

[brookst]

It’s about diversification. Don’t build a company entirely dependent on a single other company that can’t be replaced.

If your payment provider stops offering payments, it’s annoying but not existential. If your whole business is reselling a single artist and they die or switch to a different gallery, you’re done.

[kaetemi]

Ensure you have a backup supplier that you can switch to.

[j45]

Very true. It’s a small but very helpful act of looking out for your future self to generalize access to APIs or multiple providers in your codebase via your own concept of accessing a list of service providers can be easily swapped out or added to.

[marpstar]

GP's advice generally applies when talking about integrating with a third party API to provide data as a "input" to your business. The things you listed (deployment, hosting, monitoring...) are all after-the-fact concerns, and are generally interchangeable in a way that the API output schema (or systems uptime) for a particular service is not.