Every time I started a new project, I'd end up in the same loop: googling "best weather API," opening six tabs, finding three dead
links, one behind a paywall, and two with docs from 2019. The public API landscape is massive and fragmented. No single place puts
it all together in a way that actually helps you pick.
ProgrammableWeb was the closest thing to that place. It shut down in 2023. Nobody replaced it properly.
So I built https://patchbay.cc.
What makes it different
3,100+ public APIs across 56 categories: geocoding, machine learning, finance, crypto, sports, and everything in between. Every API
is tagged with auth type, HTTPS support, and CORS compatibility so you can filter to what actually works for your stack before you
open a single tab.
But the catalog isn't the interesting part.
The technical decisions
Liveness checking. APIs die quietly. patchBay runs automated checks that detect dead links, domain moves, auth changes, and HTTPS
downgrades. 67 APIs are already flagged as dead. You won't waste an afternoon integrating something that 404s.
OpenAPI discovery. A weekly cron job searches GitHub for new OpenAPI/Swagger specs, parses them, deduplicates against the existing
catalog, and auto-imports. The directory grows without manual curation.
Semantic search. Embeddings-powered. Searching "send emails programmatically" finds email APIs even when the query doesn't match
any name or tag directly.
Best-of pages. Category rankings like https://patchbay.cc/best/machine-learning and https://patchbay.cc/alternatives/stripe-api.
The comparisons I wished existed when I was evaluating options.
The stack is Next.js + Supabase + Vercel if that's useful context.
What's next
The catalog is solid. The discoverability layer is what I'm focused on now: making it genuinely faster to go from "I need an API
that does X" to actually integrating one. Changelog detection is running. Richer comparison data is in progress.
If you want to dig in
If your API is listed and needs updating, claiming is free. If you know of something missing, https://patchbay.cc/submit. And if
you want to build on top of the catalog, there's a https://patchbay.cc/developers.
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