Bitcoin Forum

I found there are several paid bitcoin API services.

They charge based on API request numbers.

Why they exist? Is it useful? Time saver?

How many time saving if use it?

Most of them are rate limited or have a quicker update frequency for paid users. So let's imagine that you have an app that it's using a specific API to show the price of Bitcoin and there are 10k people refreshing it. You will soon get rate limited for too many requests and the API will stop giving you data. This won't happen if you have a paid API with an huge/unlimited number of requests per minute.

Then crypto exchanges uses those paid API?

Yes they do. Running a business has it's expenses and cryptoexchanges are no difference. If you have an exchange where you have thousands of traders loading your pages millions of times, meaning you are sending huge requests for data so, yes the API providers will charge you.

Paid API's can also help you save time(a lot) since you won't need to fix your api everytime it hits it's rate limit. It also tends to be useful in keeping your website up and running 24/7(since it will be able to handle simultaneous requests).
Paid API's exist of course to aid website owners in handling API requests(refresh and page loading) made by users more efficiently than using free ones.

They exist because not every service provider wants to have full nodes running. They rather use a 3rd party API service.
This gives them more flexibility and saves them additional work.




This fully depends on the amount of requests you are going to do and the kind of your alternative setup you would be using.
Without those two factors no comparision can be made.

The best way for third party developers to use Twitter information is to use APIs on microblogging sites.  The two products not only cost significantly, but could be performed in the kind of query, and there was no middle ground. Previously, they had a choice between standard free API, and Enterprise-based Gnip service.

For exchange.

This does describe the scenario, but neither 1) how much requests you need to process nor 2) the alternative setup.
Is your alternative to run one node on a shitty cpu? Or is the alternative to have several servers with different nodes set up?

I haven't done any stress testing to check how much requests are possible with standard hardware components.

the benefits of using a paid API are:
· Portability. Programmers who use the API can run their programs on any operating system as long as they have the API installed. While different systems call between operating systems, with notes in implementation may be different.
· More Understandable. The API uses a more structured and understandable language than the system's call language. This is very important in terms of editing and development.

I'm sorry, I can not understand, which kind of api are you talking about.
API provided by exchange?
or
API provided by full nodes(ex. block explorers) to inquiry the blockchain and be notified when blocks and transactions?

In both cases it is for performances, paying users will get a better service, speed and uptime guaranteed.
In the first case I can not judge exchange business strategy.

In the second case, hell, here we go, centralization is near and access to blockchain with our spv client will be permissioned. Do you remember usenet?. That!

People have mentioned some of the various advantages. But I think a good real world example might be people who subscribe to the Bloomberg terminal. It allows you fast access to market numbers and news. It's good enough that they manage to charge I think around $20k per year for it. And they have like 300k subscribers. It's quite amazing really. It's not hard to see why people are trying to replicate this premium model type offering in the Bitcoin world.