Deep: New API products and strategies explored
New products, strategic decisions and the impact of AI on the future of APIs as a product
🔒DoP Deep goes deeper into the concepts and ideas that are covered in the Weekly Briefing to help you learn lessons from the experiences of top tech companies. If you’d like to upgrade to receive these in-depth pieces of analysis you can upgrade below. New reports added every month.
Hi everyone 👋,
Spotify recently decided to cut off developer access from two of its APIs and engineers weren’t particularly happy about it, as you might expect. The APIs in question included access to the "Audio Analysis" API which gives engineers access to a song's structure and musical content, fearing it could be used to train competitor AI models.
Strava made similar announcements a few weeks back, Yelp caused a mini revolt a few months earlier when it monetized its API and after the major backlash against Reddit in 2023, it later took things a step further and signed lucrative API agreements with companies like OpenAI and Google to give their AI models access to their content.
And we can probably expect to see more of this type of re-evaluation of API offerings in 2025.
Product teams no longer need to only figure out if their APIs are valuable, now they have to evaluate API offerings through an AI strategy lens, too.
In this deep dive, we’re going to explore how product teams are adapting their API strategies. We’ll focus on two dimensions in particular: first, what new API products have been released recently which might be useful for product teams and second, what strategic decisions have been made regarding API products.
Coming up:
New API products and strategies explored from top tier companies including: Spotify, Palantir, Figma, Stripe, ElevenLabs, Telegram, Uber, Android, YouTube - and what they tell us about the future of APIs
Why Spotify's controversial API shutdown reveals a major shift in how tech companies protect their AI moats
How one of Figma's new APIs is being used as a subtle but powerful retention driver
How companies are combining APIs, hardware, and AI to create entirely new product experiences
All of the 20+ companies featured in more detail
How this analysis is structured
This analysis looks at over 20 different API products and / or strategic decisions made by top tier companies. Here’s a sample of some of the companies featured:
Each API featured is broken down into the following:
Company - the company shortlisted for this deep dive. This includes a broad spectrum of B2B SaaS and B2C companies including Spotify, Palantir, Figma, Stripe, Uber, X / Grok, YouTube and more.
APIs - the API/s featured. This includes recently released, new API products which are noteworthy for product teams as well as more established APIs that have been the subject of recent strategic decisions or changes.
GraphQL vs REST - does the API featured use GraphQL or REST?
More details - this is broken down into two subcategories: new API launches includes recently released APIs that product teams might find interesting and strategic decisions which help us to understand how the API product landscape is changing. For example, a new API launch from Stripe which allows agents to take payments is noteworthy for product teams since it may impact the types of payment journeys they build. And new strategic decisions include Strava’s decision to block third party access to APIs or X’s decision to reduce its prices due to efficiency gains which makes it cheaper to serve.
Links to more info - each API and strategic decision includes further details for more information.
The full list of companies featured is available for paid subscribers at the end of this post.
A deeper look at the companies featured
Now that we’ve set the context, let’s dig a little deeper into some of the companies featured. We’ll explore API strategy and new API releases separately and we’ll start with an exploration of how API product strategy is evolving.