Hey everyone! I just released a rate limiting API that evaluates whether a user can proceed based on specified parameters. It's designed as a paid product, charging $0.75 for every 100,000 requests. Although it's primarily for developers, I'm really passionate about the open-source community and am considering whether to make this API open source. Currently, only the client APIs are public. Would open sourcing everything be a smart move? Also, I'm trying to figure out if this approach could help me with marketing and finding product-market fit, since that's been a challenge for me. Appreciate your insights!
3 Answers
Look, it’s fine to open source, but just remember that any serious user with significant traffic is likely to use rate limiting functions from established providers like Cloudflare or AWS. You might want to think about how to differentiate your offering if you do.
I say go for it and open source it! This could help you create a community around it and gain more users. Once you have a solid base, you could still offer a managed service for those who don't want to self-host. Just keep in mind it might take some work to make your service standout enough that people would choose it over rolling their own solution.
Honestly, I think you might want to reconsider how you’ve structured the API. Rate limiting should usually be integrated at the API gateway or firewall level instead of as a separate service. If users can bypass it, it could lead to security issues. And about the pricing—$0.75 per 100k requests could get very pricey for high traffic situations, like 10,000 calls per second which could cost around $210k/month! Think about how you'll structure that if you're looking at serving average developers, because that wouldn’t scale well. Open sourcing could be beneficial for community involvement, just weigh that against your business goals.
Yeah, I think a different approach could be beneficial. Maybe consider deploying it as a serverless function. It makes it a lot easier for developers to integrate into their projects!
I totally agree! The separation of the rate limiting from the main API could be a problem. Users can easily skip calling your service, making it less effective for controlling server load.