Every day, new and exciting APIs go live. This can make hunting for useful APIs a bit like digging for a needle in a haystack. It doesn’t help matters that press releases have a tendency towards breathless, hyperbolic language, making sure that you know — in no uncertain terms — that their product is The! Best! Thing! Since! Sliced! Bread!

To help make your lives a little easier, we’ve dug through a bunch of emails, press releases, and API directories in search of noteworthy APIs from 2021. Hopefully, this roundup will give you some idea of what’s out there and what’s worth your time.

8 Noteworthy APIs From 2021

Allfeeds AI

Podcasting has become a big business in recent years. Everyone from the New York Times to the Harvard Business Review has been creating their own narrative audio content. It’s gotten so big that platforms like Spotify and Amazon even offer native apps for creating your own podcast.

With podcasts being so omnipresent, it can be hard to keep track of them all, let alone find new podcasts worth a listen. Allfeeds AI’s podcast API is here to fix that.

Allfeeds AI is much more than just a simple search engine. Their podcast API returns all relevant data for a podcast, including iTunes ID, email address, and cover art. If you’ve been thinking of creating a podcast directory of some kind, you should include Allfeeds AI’s API into your stack.

Ayrshare API

Social media management can quickly get expensive. Tools can also be somewhat limited in scope, meaning you might need a separate solution for scheduling your TikTok posts, for instance. So not only is your social media stack costing you money, it’s also giving you more to do — neither of which any of us need.

Enter Ayrshare API, a clever social media management API that lets you conduct many of your social media duties from an API interface. Ayrshare makes it simple to post text, photos, and video to any connected social media account. You can even delete posts. Posts can be published directly or scheduled for a later time.

Most of that is all fairly standard social media management. But, Ayrshare’s got a few more clever tricks up its sleeve — like the ability to automatically include relevant hashtags. It can even include Unsplash images directly based on included keywords.

Add in the ability to schedule posts directly from an RSS feed, and Ayrshare is a handy tool for programmable social media automation.

Diggernaut API

Like some of the other APIs on our list, the Diggernaut API is designed to make a previously academic subject accessible to nearly anybody. Although it’s been around for quite a while, data scraping is very much an art form and doubly so if you don’t have much programming experience.

Things get even trickier still if you’re dealing with unstructured data. And if you’ve ever tried to use a premade web scraper, you’ll know that not only are a lot of web scraping software and platforms prohibitively confusing; they also don’t work very well much of the time.

The Diggernaut API is intended to bridge your development projects and the Diggernaut platform. This means that the Diggernaut API can be highly useful for automated data scraping projects.

One of the best things about the Diggernaut API is that you can fully interact with your web scraping projects, known as diggers, entirely through the API. A number of endpoints support PATCH and DELETE requests along with the usual GET and POST queries.

PriceLabs Dynamic Pricing API

Have you visited the Airbnb website recently? Noticed a wide fluctuation in prices? A beachfront cottage in Malibu could be renting for $100 a night, one weekend, and going for $750 the following week.

To say that the Coronavirus has thrown the travel industry into disarray would be a massive understatement. It used to be fairly predictable to anticipate travel patterns. Tourists on a budget could plan trips during off-seasons, and realtors knew what the demand would look like in different seasons and could price accordingly.

Not anymore.

To help remedy this situation, PriceLabs has created the Dynamic Pricing API, allowing rental property owners to predict future rental prices based on current data. PriceLabs’ API isn’t just for Airbnb properties, either. Property managers of all kinds have been using this new API to boost profits across the board.

Prism Data

Banking and finance are not exactly known for being ethical or humanitarian. In fact, predatory lending practices and unequal access to capital seem designed to widen the income gap with each successive generation.

That’s one reason that any humanitarian effort regarding banking deserves recognition — even better still when it’s a useful product.

Prism Data is a new B2B API designed by Petal, a new credit card company designed to help customers rebuild their credit. Rather than relying on credit scores, Petal uses a clever system of their own devising called CashScore to make financial decisions.

Rather than relying on credit scores, CashScores considers a web of related variables, from cash on hand to banking history, to determine if a customer is a possible credit risk. With Prism Data, Petal is making CashScores available to other business owners and financial institutions to make more informed financial decisions.

Prism Data is still in Beta at the time of writing, but you can apply to be one of their Beta testers.

Storekit 2

Selling things has become intensely complex in today’s interconnected, always-on, global marketplace. You’ve got potential customers from all over, all of whom are better informed than any other time in history, while you’re essentially lined up shoulder-to-shoulder with your competition. In addition, the buyer’s cycle looks more like a fun straw than a straight line. We’re constantly adding in new sources of revenue and marketing platforms, as well.

It’s a lot.

That means Storekit 2 is a relief for eCommerce developers using iOS. Swiftkit 2 is a new series of Swift-based APIs for Apple developers, explicitly designed for today’s convoluted sales climate.

Swiftkit 2 is designed to make retrieving product information as easy and efficient as possible. It’s also set up to enable in-app purchases and can help keep track of sales and marketing. Swiftkit 2 logs a customer’s purchase history, subscription status, and eligibility for promotions.

Storekit 2 is as good for the end-user as it is for the developer. Customers can request refunds and manage their subscriptions directly from their app. This is good news for your customer service team, as well, as your customer service reps can call up pertinent customer data using the API.

Tuya Open API

Data is quite literally the lifeblood of the Internet of Things (IoT). Or maybe it’s the nervous system — pick your metaphor. Real-time streaming data, SMART devices, and constant connectivity are all elements that make the IoT possible. They’re also some of the things that make working with the IoT so challenging.

That’s one of the best things about APIs becoming more firmly established. There are a ton more powerful out-of-the-box solutions, even for highly technical topics like IoT.

Tuya is a developer of IoT-related products and services. One of these products is the Tuya Open API which allows you to control IoT devices from an API.

Tuya’s APIs are designed to operate with their cloud device platform. The good news about this is that you can customize your IoT projects to specify which API products you wish to consume. You can also use the Tuya Open API with popular API management systems like Postman, though, so you’re not solely stuck with proprietary software.

Visualize API by Keen

Data can be incredibly powerful, but it can quickly become too much of a good thing. If you’re not careful, you might go looking for a sip from the tap and end up with the whole ocean instead. This means that data visualization is increasingly important for anyone looking to make data-driven decisions.

Unfortunately, a lot of Business Information (BI) solutions can be prohibitively expensive. Luckily, the Visualize API by keen should raise a celebratory cheer from any developer looking to create powerful, useful dashboards and analytics without having to take out a second mortgage.

Keen is first and foremost an event streaming platform, but their Visualize platform is what first caught our eye. Not only does Visualize let you create and embed virtually any form of data visualization you can think of, from pie charts to audience geolocation, most of these features are available without having to write a single line of code.

Visualize even lets you create interactive dashboards, which previously required you to be a JS jedi.

Visualize’s dashboards and analytics could be useful for anything from digital marketing to convincing your C-Suite why additional funding would be a good idea. With Visualize, you don’t even need to be a data scientist to make the most of your data.

Final Thoughts

What are some of your favorite APIs? If you operate one of these APIs, or know of some good, interesting, useful, and well-made APIs, help them get the recognition they deserve by nominating them for Nordic APIs Best Public API contest!