Web Design Blog

7 Unique APIs for making interesting projects or side hustles

People here seemed to like the last version of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/kmfmjd/8_apis_for_interesting_projects_in_2021/
So I’m back with some more interesting APIs that you can either use to make a cool portfolio project or even build a profitable side project with. Only limit is your creativity with some of these tools

Shodan – You can think of Shodan as Google for every device connected to the internet. They crawl the web and catalog devices, when you hear stories about people’s IoT devices getting hacked they probably got found with Shodan. Crazy what you can find, just make sure not to get yourself arrested

RadarIO API – Provides a bunch of really cool geolocation based features. Stuff like real-time location tracking, geofencing, Google maps style directions, and a huge database of “places” where you can verify if users visit. Also a new API that uses bluetooth so you can even do location based stuff inside retail buildings with accuracy of a few meters.

Web Hose – They basically scrape the entire internet and then organize the data to make it easy to access via API. Lot’s of social media management tools use this behind the scene to monitor for mentions of company names. You can find the most popular content about “javascript” created online within the last 16 days based on number of social shares and sort it by the amount of traffic to the domain

People Data Labs – Can be pretty creepy if used wrong, but also can enhance your product. Not sure how they get their data but an example is if you have somebody sign up for a free trial of your app with just an email, you can use that to sometimes find out where they work and their job title. Mainly used by sales teams to prioritize high value leads.

Crawlera – Makes it easy to build scalable bots and web scrapers without getting blocked, could basically make your own Web Hose with Crawlera

SpaceX API – Pretty simple compared to the others, but still fun to play around with this data. Could make a dashboard as a frontend project

Segment – Used to connect a bunch of different data sources together with just a few lines of code, tons of use cases

If you want more detail of each and a few project ideas you can check out my video covering them:
https://youtu.be/XerRP4zeOzs
If I missed any cool APIs you like, let me know. Also feel free to brainstorm on ideas about how you could use APIs