[syerram2]

An insurance plan for APIs - in today's world companies are extremely reliant on 3rd party APIs for a variety of applications (FB Ads API, Twitter's API, etc.), however, in my experience, these APIs are not a 100% reliable & can sometimes go down which impacts the end customer/user. Similar to travel insurance, if you can provide the option as an add-on to buy insurance against this downtime - there are several business models - but essentially you would be offering a modern day "SLA".

[bennyhirsch]

Interesting thought. How would this insurance plan work? monthly payment to Twitter for API insurance, and if their API goes down just a financial payout? This doesn't really make me whole again as my business is still impacted.

[syerram2]

I don't think you'd pay Twitter - essentially - you would pay this "third" party service similar to any insurance company & when there is an incident - this service would investigate & offer you a payout. Just like any car/home insurance plan - where the payout is based on your coverage plan/incident. Then, based on the payout amount you can potentially give your customers a "discount" for that month. (in a SaaS B2B business)From a technical perspective, it would be ideal if this third party insurance provider can act as a "stop gap" or a "temp API" if the main service provider's API is down. (maybe they have a separate API connection with say someone like Twitter which is more reliable than the one you have - I'm thinking something like a firehose)

[bennyhirsch]

I like the ideal scenario. Are there multiple kinds of Twitter's API? where some are more reliable than others? And would the third party insurer have the ability to allow impacted clients of Twitter to access it? The financial payout makes the insurance a good hedge but the "ideal" scenario would ensure 100% up time.

[syerram2]

There are usually multiple levels of Twitter API access. (regular, white label, fire hose) The same can be applied to FB Ads API (reg, pmd, spmd) & many other APIs. In my experience, a lot of these APIs aren't as reliable and can sometimes cause huge financial loses. (Imagine if you use the FB Ads API to run an Ad campaign for a client - it goes out of sync & you sync back 10 mins later - in a matter of 10 mins - you could've spend $X) Since your relying on the networks API - they are not liable for any sync issues - you have to take that on as a liability on your end. Ideally, the third party would have premium level access all these APIs that you can leverage, but the big value add would be around the financial payout versus the premium level API access. (It would something like gnip.com with insurance)