Notes from building ApyHub.
Engineering write-ups, product decisions, and the occasional opinion on how to ship developer infrastructure. Long enough to be useful, short enough that you'll finish it.
We Built Seven Services and Sold None of Them
A founder's account of the internal APIs and services that stay locked inside a product. Why the decision not to sell them was correct, what changed now that Claude, Cursor, GitHu…
Web Scraping in 2026: What Changed, What's Legal, and What to Use Instead
Cloudflare blocks agent crawlers by default from September 2026 and courts are targeting the method of collection. What web scraping looks like now.
OCR in Python: Extract Text From Images, Scans, Receipts, and Invoices
How to do OCR in Python with pytesseract, where it breaks on real documents, benchmark numbers for 6 libraries, and when to use an OCR API instead.
Domain Intelligence APIs: What You Can Learn About a Domain Before You Trust It
WHOIS, domain age, health, tech stack, sitemap, and screenshots. The domain intelligence APIs that answer whether a website is what it claims to be.
Free APIs for Developers and Agents: What the Free Tiers Actually Give You
A free API means four different things, and two of them want your card. What the free tiers on RapidAPI, APILayer, Eden AI and ApyHub actually give you.
Stateful vs Stateless Protocols: The Difference, and Why REST Is Stateless
A stateless protocol treats every request as independent. A stateful one remembers. The difference between stateful and stateless, and where REST actually sits.
Top 5 Rank Tracking APIs to Build Your Own SEO Monitoring Stack
Rank tracking APIs return search positions programmatically. Five ApyHub APIs to track Google rankings and ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity visibility.
The Hard Part of PDF-to-Excel Isn’t the Text. It’s the Table
There’s a quiet difference between two things that look identical on screen: a spreadsheet that shows a table, and a spreadsheet that is a table. Most people never notice the gap…
Dynamic pricing: every API call costs what the work actually costs
ApyHub APIs can price each request by the work performed, not by an average or a worst-case ceiling. What that means for providers publishing APIs and for the teams calling them.
HTML to PDF API: What It Does and Why Teams Use One
Turn a web page or HTML into a PDF with one API call. What HTML to PDF APIs are used for, why teams stop building it themselves, and the options on ApyHub.
How to Promote Your API After You Publish It
Your API is live. Here is how to bring developers to it: your own channels, the agent angle, writing that shows what your API makes possible, and the platforms worth publishing on.
How to Monetize an API in 2026: Pricing, Distribution, and What You Actually Keep
A practical guide to API monetization: the commission every major marketplace takes, how to price per call, and what changes now that agents are the buyers.