Build your own API vs Using 3rd PartyAPIs

Hey guys, long time no see.

Work has been very busy for me over the past few months hence the absence of articles.

We are back and better than ever!

Today to get myself back into the flow of things, I will be discussing how to answer the following question, Building your own API vs using a 3rd party API.

To quickly clarify this article will revolve around these considerations for personal projects, I dont want to receive a strongly worded email about a production incident at your company!

To begin we must consider the full scope of your project. Are you building a simple one page app that will at most make a couple of API calls? Or are you a bit more adventurous and creating a behemoth project, with complex relationships between backend and frontend services?

Even between both approaches here there is nuance.

You can make the argument that to spin up a simple project, in the interest of time you could just use an existing API as you wont be making many calls your bill should be relatively cheap. To play devils advocate you can also infer that creating a simple data scraping pipeline and a couple of endpoints is not difficult work either.