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Developer experience for APIs.

API Client
Our review

What we like

Provides endpoint discovery and request monitoring via middleware, which makes it easy to integrate into an existing API. Records API requests for debugging - can be replayed from the dashboard or via a Postman download. API spec drift detection with alerting. Easily create a dashboard for API users to login and review their usage. Sensitive fields can be masked. Cloud or self-hosted.

What we don't like

API integration and instrumentation SDKs only available for Go, Typescript, Java. Self-service API key rotation not yet supported.

Reviewed: 2022-11-03

Developer Interview

With Sagar Batchu, CEO

2022-09-22

What is Speakeasy? Why did you build it?

Today, APIs are exploding in popularity. There are so many API-first businesses across different verticals, or businesses where the API is an important product surface - the more your API gets used the higher chance that your company is leading the market. But for most APIs today, the status quo of integration and usage is still a big bottleneck to growth. Companies continue to support a lot of API users with just static documentation. There’s a lot of hand holding and an immense support load on builders of APIs. And on the flip side, the devex required to use APIs could be a lot easier than it is today. It hasn’t really progressed despite how crazy popular they are.

That was the really basic thesis around why we started Speakeasy. We just wanted to make it really simple for developers to both produce and consume APIs.

In terms of products, we do two things today. The first is a developer portal that finally lets companies move beyond docs, to make self-service API integrations possible. What does that mean? We create embeds that are powered by an SDK that you put into your API. The SDK captures data directly from your API and powers experiences like usage dashboards and request viewers that enable the end user to unblock themselves when using your API without getting on a call with your dev team or sharing logs over a ticket. Interestingly, the embeds can either be integrated into your existing dev portal – or we can create a brandable Developer Experience Portal on your behalf if all you really have is docs today for example. Either way, these components provide a best-in-class devex for your end users, and reduces work for your API team.

The second product is Client SDKs as a Service that make integrating with your API as simple and ergonomic as possible. We built a new set of generators from the ground up with a focus on reliability and idiomatic language choices. They’re available for Typescript, Go, Python, Java and Rust. We auto-generate these client SDKs from your OpenAPI 3.0 spec – so really minimal dev work is required – compare this with the current status quo where SDKs either have to be hand-rolled from scratch, or you take an open-source generator’s SDK that is full of bugs and code that looks like a machine wrote. With these auto-generated SDKs, users of your API can guarantee type safety, and through extensions we can enable even more value-added features such as auth, pagination, retries, and integrating with our Developer Experience Portal for analytics and so on.

Overall, you can think of Speakeasy as the API platform team at your company that builds internal tooling that helps externalize information to your users in the form of dashboards, client-SDKs, tooling, and documentation.

Our vision is that developers get to focus 100% of their time on the API code itself. And at some point we get to this place where you git commit and you have a fantastic devex spun up for your API much in the way that we have seamless infrastructure hosting. That’s come out of companies like Heroku, where you just push your app, you have it hosted. There’s a similar, analogous story for APIs that’s evolving.

We want to wrap that all up into a product that can be used instantaneously with your existing APIs. Companies use Speakeasy as a way to provide an interactive and powerful developer portal experience as well as client SDKs for the users to actually consume those APIs. So it really just comes down to spending less of your dev time on support. The success of companies like Twilio and Stripe has set the expectations of what a good API is.

Engineering Profile

Instantly create SDKs.

At Speakeasy we’re building the next generation of API infrastructure. APIs both external and internal are increasingly important but are often artificially restricted in usage and potential revenue, often through poor developer experience. This is especially true of REST APIs which are 80%+ of the ecosystem. Consumers who rely on these critical interfaces are left with little to no last mile tooling meaning their “average time to 200” is measured in days and weeks. We have been building out Client SDKs as a Service as our first product along with a suite of tooling for API authentication, telemetry and more. We believe this is just the beginning and are expanding deeper into the stack capturing more of the API value chain as we go.

What are some recent examples of interesting development challenges solved by internal teams as part of building the product?

Our code generation system is truly next gen, one of the problems that we had to solve along the way was crafting a way to make adding languages more repeatable. Our code generation engine therefore works off of a combination of templating and AST type manipulation. We also use LLMs to make sure our customer’s APIs are described in the best way possible.

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