Developer Strategies Help

Important: Our service is designed with developers and IT departments as the primary audience of the service. Our API is the cornerstone of our existence. In fact, our own website uses our API. There's some dog food joke in there.

Important: It's possible that some, or all, of the functionality of your application could compete with the functionality of our website. That's perfectly fine. Our pricing is designed around usage of our API, not usage of our website.

What models or strategies for using your API do you recommend?

Recommending a specific usage model or strategy is outside of our domain, because it completely depends on your needs and use case.

We can, however, foresee the following potential models, which will hopefully serve as ideas for you to expand on, depending on your needs:

  • Mobile App
  • Better Website
  • Bespoke Application Integration
  • Fully-Fledged Alerting Service
  • Curated Web Content Monitoring Service

Below we elaborate on each of these potential use cases for our API.

What do you mean by "Mobile App"?

We do not have mobile apps for our service, and we do not intend to develop any.

If you want to develop mobile apps that use our API, and basically replicate our website functionality on mobile devices, that would be fantastic.

We did not include user account management and payments in our API, which means users will still need to visit our website to manage their user accounts (register, close, upgrade, downgrade, billing, settings).

There are three ways that you can monetize your efforts, namely:

  1. Charge a price of your choice for people to use your mobile app. We don't want or need to know that you charge or what you charge.
  2. Register as an affiliate of ours and refer your new users to our website via your affiliate link to register their user accounts.
  3. Display ads in your mobile app.

You will need to use our Authorization Code grant scheme to obtain access tokens to authenticate to the API.

What do you mean by "Better Website"?

We know. Our website is ugly, and it works. Like that cough medicine.

If you want to develop a super razzle-dazzle website that uses our API, and basically replicate our website functionality, you're welcome to do so.

We did not include user account management and payments in our API, which means users will still need to visit our website to manage their user accounts (register, close, upgrade, downgrade, billing, settings).

There are two ways that you can monetize your efforts, namely:

  1. Charge a price of your choice for people to use your website. We don't want or need to know that you charge or what you charge.
  2. Register as an affiliate of ours and refer your new users to our website via your affiliate link to register their user accounts.
  3. Display ads on your website.

You will need to use our Authorization Code grant scheme to obtain access tokens to authenticate to the API.

What do you mean by "Bespoke Application Integration"?

If you have a bespoke application (new or existing) that need some kind of alerting service, either to monitor external events, or monitor the health of the application itself, then use our API for those alerting needs instead of redeveloping the wheel inside your application.

It probably will not be the only SaaS that your application uses, but it will be the best!

Only you will have a user account on our service. If your application has its own end users, we will not and don't want to be aware of them.

Our API provides partitions and dataSegmentCode fields that you can use to separate the data that belongs to each of your users, if needed.

You will need to use our Client Credentials grant scheme or the Account Access Token to obtain access tokens to authenticate to the API.

What do you mean by "Fully-Fledged Alerting Service"?

If you want to use our API to develop your own competing alerting service, you're welcome to do so.

In this case you will not use our user account and billing management. You will build all user account features and billing into your own application.

How you monetize your application is none of our business.

Also, you don't need to give any credit or disclosure that you're using our API.

Only you will have a user account on our service. We will not and don't want to be aware of the end users of your application.

Our API provides partitions and dataSegmentCode fields that you can use to separate the data that belongs to each of your users.

You will need to use our Client Credentials grant scheme or the Account Access Token to obtain access tokens to authenticate to the API.

What do you mean by "Curated Web Content Monitoring Service"?

You could set up web content monitors that watch the pages of an online retailer for the appearance of specific items or specific price levels, and then alert your users when those items appear on the web pages.

This model is similar to the Fully-Fledged Alerting Service model above, except that it is more limited in scope.

Note: Our pricing is designed around usage of our API, not usage of our website.

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