Building for the API 99%

Rob Galanakis on April 10, 2023

protesters in the occupy wall street movement

The essence of WebhookDB's practical approach is design for the 99%.

That means the 99% of apps that won't be dealing with billions of rows. Lean on an amazing ecosystem of established technology.

The 99% of APIs that won't ever be supported on ETL and IPaaS marketplaces. Make it easy to build exotic and custom integrations.

The 99% of devs who don't benefit from learning a proprietary or specialized language or framework. Use the database of your choice to access your data.

And the 99% of customers who want simple, predictable, and affordable licensing, rather than proprietary SaaS. De-risk adding 3rd party vendors to your stack.


Most APIs are not Stripe, Twilio, or Shopify.

Most APIs are secondary offerings from companies where their primary product is their application. Their API is a nice value-add to the main show.

These are "the API 99%." Products that, in the aggregate, are very widely used, but without the size (or connections) to make it into marketplaces and showcases.

WebhookDB's approach is designed for the API 99%. Not only do we support a bunch of APIs out-of-the-box you won't find elsewhere, but you're also able to build, test, and maintain your own integrations the same way we do. Custom integrations involve implementing a single interface. We even provide an executable specification to verify the implementation.

On top of that, you get to enrich API data by normalizing fields — booleans are always boolean, timestamps are always timestamptz, etc.

By unifying the API 99% into SQL, we empower almost anyone to ask and answer their own questions.

If you have data behind some 3rd party APIs you want to democratize access to by structuring and storing it in a database, give WebhookDB a try or get in touch.


My sincere apologies to the late, great David Graeber, who is credited with coining the term "we are the 99%" during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I am a enormous fan of his, and recommend in the strongest terms you read anything and everything he's written. Appropriating "the 99%" to promote a commercial endeavour doesn't make me feel great, but here we are.

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