<story><title>The rise of the API-based SaaS</title><url>https://blog.chartmogul.com/api-based-saas/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomschlick</author><text>The struggle that many people have with API based providers is that they don&amp;#x27;t abstract that functionality in their application to a driver based system. For something as crucial as mail, payments, sms, etc you absolutely need to build it as if the provider could go away at any point.&lt;p&gt;Case in point: Mandrill announced two days ago that they were going to merge their product with MailChimp which included a terms of service change that banned marketing emails from Mandrill after their forced migration date in April. At work we have a commercial real estate app which lets our customers send marketing emails. We had built this functionality on top of mandrill but using a driver based system. Last night I launched a Mailgun driver and we have already started to migrate customers with their own Mandrill accounts to MG. If we hadn&amp;#x27;t used a driver based system we would be screwed for the next few weeks.&lt;p&gt;Build your api integrations via drivers. Even if you only have one driver. You will be happy you did later.</text></comment>
<story><title>The rise of the API-based SaaS</title><url>https://blog.chartmogul.com/api-based-saas/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thecodemonkey</author><text>We&amp;#x27;re in the exact same bucket at geocod.io[1]. I definitely agree with the sentiment that there is less flexibility with pricing on an API-based SaaS.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve also decided to go with the usage-based model, on the contrary it however also makes it easy to make a simple a transparent pricing model.&lt;p&gt;We still have a UI-based piece with a spreadsheet upload tool, but under the hood it&amp;#x27;s more or less just a GUI on top of our API.&lt;p&gt;When building out a new SaaS, I think it should be clear from the beginning whether it lends itself to an API-first approach, especially as a part of target audience research. In our case our primary target audience is developers, and the secondary is data analysts that prefer the GUI-based approach for one-off batches.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;geocod.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;geocod.io&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>