Many PaaS/SaaS startups rely on upstream services that are accessed via APIs. Unfortunately, the provider may break the API, resulting in a temporary or permanent loss of some or all of the startup's revenue. Example: your business provides photo filters for social media and Instagram changes/breaks/revokes your API access. That's significant and may kill your business [1].
If an API-dependent startup asked me for investment I'd ask "What happens if these critical APIs break?"
I'd expect to hear something like this:
1. We’ve discussed API use with the providers and we have good contacts at each. We have high confidence that API access will not be revoked, and we can expect a prompt response if breakage occurs. (Ideally there would also be a contract featuring API availability guarantees.)
2. We operate within each provider's Terms of Service and our business model does not conflict with the providers' business models.
3. Customers could continue to use our PaaS by manually uploading their data and fetching the output from our service.
4. We've reverse-engineered official consumer client software and could impersonate consumers, thereby continuing to access official APIs. (Obviously plenty of questions here about good-faith, legality, ToS, etc.) For example see [2].
Additionally I'd like to hear:
5. We've analysed the likelihood of each provider obsoleting our product by offering our service direct to their customers.
Each of these has pros & cons and I don’t suggest any is ideal or desirable. However I’d expect to hear a detailed response on how to handle revocation/breakage of business-critical upstream APIs.
How would you answer this question?
What other responses would you want to hear?
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/02/instagram-third-party-apps-websites-dead/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605342
