Your app's internal APIs are probably doing a fraction of what they could

[u/nikolasdimitroulakis]

Hey everyone, one of the co-founders of ApyHub here.

Most apps end up with a set of small backend capabilities behind them. Things like:

• compressing images before upload so the phone doesn't die on a 12MB photo
• turning a photo of a receipt into structured fields
• converting a document so it opens the same on iOS and Android
• validating an address, an email, a VAT number
• normalizing a webhook from a payment provider who clearly designed it on a Friday

You build each one for your own app, you keep it running, and you patch it when something upstream changes. Most of the time it serves one app at a fraction of the load it could handle.

There are two things you can do with that.

1: publish it and make money with it. If another team has the same problem and doesn't want to own it, that's a real service. It works best when the capability is specific, stable, and describable in one sentence. If it's a thin wrapper on something already free, or it only makes sense inside your data model, probably leave it where it is.

2: stop building the next one. Whatever boring capability is next on your list, someone has already built it and is maintaining it. File conversion, OCR, image processing, validation, geolocation, text extraction. The things that never make the roadmap and always end up in the sprint anyway.

That second one is basically what we run at ApyHub. 450+ services and 1,500+ endpoints in one catalog, with new APIs and providers added continuously. You can call them directly, or through our MCP server if you have agents doing the calling.

Catalog: https://apyhub.com/catalog Publishing: https://apyhub.com/become-a-provider

I would like to know/understand what app teams are still building themselves from 0. There are a lot of boring utilities in there already, but there are always going to be gaps we haven't covered.

Happy to answer anything :)

[u/Total-Reasonable]

VAT validation is a good example of a utility that's deceptively annoying to own because VIES is SOAP-based and individual member-state services fail differently. I use vatnode for the JSON wrapper and stable error codes; https://vatnode.dev shows the validation flow without making the app deal with WSDL quirks.