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.