RapidAPI レビュー 161

Since becoming part of Nokia, they've been like professional extortionists. A 25% fee? What the heck is that? Are they short on cash or affected by the war? Previously 20% was enough, but what the heck, I only receive 75% of my monthly income now, especially since the payout is sometimes late.

I am planning to move my API

I am an API provider on RapidAPI with two published APIs. This is not the first time they have failed to pay me correctly.

Previously, I had the same issue where my payout was missing. Their support took over 18 days to respond, and when they finally did, they claimed the issue was resolved and the full amount was sent — it was not. The case was closed without a proper resolution.

Now it is happening again. I have submitted multiple support requests and it is like sending messages into a black hole — nobody responds, nobody follows up, and nobody actually solves anything. Even when a support agent named Robert was assigned to my case, the issue was marked as resolved without being resolved.

No matter how many times I complain, nothing happens. No accountability, no follow-through, complete silence.

For a platform that takes 25% of every transaction and positions itself as a professional marketplace, this level of support is unacceptable. I am now seriously considering removing my APIs from RapidAPI entirely, because what is the point of publishing here if you cannot trust that you will be paid?

I am filing a BBB complaint. If you are a developer thinking of publishing your API here, think twice.

Terrible, keep charging me for what I already canceled subscription. ROBBERY!

Integrated an API into my website, but literally 1 day later I noticed an suspicious transaction. After looking this up, it is a 'verification' transaction for scammers. Soon larger transactions would follow.

In short: This platform leaked my credit card details.

Here’s a polished, professional version that keeps your tone direct and clear:
I've used RapidAPI to host our SaaS API for years. They’ve had issues and the UI has never been great, but I worked with their developers to resolve most of the problems. However, they just increased their fee from 20% to 25% of our monthly payout without any warning.

I have been an API provider on RapidAPI for over two years. Overall, I like the platform and want it to improve, which is why I am writing this review. This perspective is from a provider, not a consumer.

To keep things fair, I will split this review into three parts: the good, the questionable, and the bad.

The Good:

I have always received my payouts. Delays were rare and always resolved.

Creating and updating APIs is easy. Uploading an OpenAPI specification or a Postman Collection saves time, reduces errors, and makes the process much smoother.

The built-in testing suite is useful. I can test endpoints and run automated tests. Email reports show successes and failures, it would be better though if specific failed tests were included (there are also issues, more on that later).

API versioning works well. Creating new versions, releasing them, and deprecating older versions is relatively simple.

Messaging and announcements are helpful. Communicating directly with customers is a useful feature.

Communication with RapidAPI staff has generally been pleasant, and issues I raised were mostly resolved.

Questionable Aspects:

Fees increased from 20% to 25%, without visible improvements to justify it. The platform overall feels relatively inactive, with few updates and little communication or social-media posts about changes.

Some decisions are confusing. For example, messages were moved from Studio to Console without explanation.

The MCP playground is risky. Automated agents already heavily bombarded my APIs, and without clear overage controls or refund policies, this adds risk for providers.

Navigation is a major issue. Users are redirected to the playground instead of the main API page when clicking on a search result, and many never see the documentation. This leads to faulty requests and fewer direct messages with questions or feedback.

There are also UX problems. Ratings default to one star, and users have to click their selected rating twice to prevent it from being submitted incorrectly.

Messages and announcements are mixed together, which makes it difficult to find one-to-one conversations with users after sending announcements.

Email notifications are inconsistent. Sometimes there are none, and sometimes the same notification is sent multiple times.

The testing suite, while useful in theory, is unreliable. Tests sometimes fail even when endpoints are working and my own test scripts pass, which can negatively impact public metrics.

The Bad:

RapidAPI has serious problems with spam and scams. Many listings are not real APIs but redirect users to external platforms or questionable services.

The scale of this issue is significant. For example, searching for “LinkedIn” returns around 1700 results, most of which are not actual APIs. Searching for “Buy LinkedIn accounts” returns over 1400 results consisting almost entirely of spam or scams. Similar problems exist for Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms.

Crypto-recovery scams are also widespread. Searching for “crypto recovery” returns hundreds of results that follow the same pattern, redirecting users to external messaging platforms or suspicious websites. These scams also appear in discussions, and providers have to deal with them directly.
(Quick side note: if you ever have crypto stolen, recovery services promising to get it back are scams and will take even more from you.)

Refund policies are unclear, and overages are billed after usage rather than upfront. This creates situations where usage is never paid for.

These spam and scam issues are known to RapidAPI. I reported it back in September 2025 in an email and received a response stating that such reports are taken seriously. However, the situation has not improved.

This lack of quality control harms both users and providers and significantly damages the platform’s credibility.

Conclusion:

RapidAPI has good ideas and useful features, but the current state is disappointing.

Between weak communication, inconsistent design decisions, and widespread spam and scams, the experience as a provider is frustrating. For a new consumer, it is likely even more confusing.

Rapid has really fallen downhill in recent years.

It's a real shame to be writing this. I used to love RapidAPI as a consumer, to the point where I started distributing my own APIs on there when I first launched my business.

Since then, however, the company has really fallen flat. Multiple silly little bugs, like the tab title being "Create React App Sample", meaningless errors stating "Something went wrong" when loading a page (successfully), usage alert emails being completely useless. 3XX responses causing users to be billed multiple times, etc.

When I saw Nokia had taken over, I had hoped that it would be the start of a bit of an improvement. But about a year has passed and it's no better.

I've had a user payment fail, and honestly, I'm not bothered to chase it up with them. The overage payment forgiveness process is absolutely insane, and the lack of mobile responsiveness of the dashboard is just embarrassing.

And after all of this, they have the nerve to bump fees up to 25% to cover their costs. I could live with this if I actually saw some intent to improve the system, but I've already got my own overhead costs, and 25% + the overhead costs and having to update my code to facilitate requests from Rapid, it's just not worth it anymore.

I'm not really asking for much. To be completely honest, I've built my own account system and payment handling off platform. It's a million times easier to use than Rapid, I can manage and update things myself when and how I want to. Implementing this has also highlighted to me that their product really isn't that complicated.

Nokia, stop trying to squeeze every penny out of Rapid without putting anything back in. Either kill the product or revive it. It's honestly shocking that you have decided to push your fees onto the providers. Presumably you're trying to squeeze out some more money to cover up for terrible management, but a better API marketplace will/has already come around, and people will move onto their own platforms.

It's so sad to see what was a great service turn into a complete and utter failure.

Started getting charged thousands due to consistently going over limit which was ten fold above the expected. Went unnoticed for a while. Upgraded to the next tier and guess what, all of a sudden the spikes completely dropped so that I never really needed to upgrade. This was also around the time they were gettin acquired by Nokia. Avoid at all cost.

Takes them 3 Weeks to initiate a 25$ refund for some reason, even tho the vendor of the API responded within 20min.

Shoutout to Scrapeninja, the guy responded within 20min, but rapidAPI isn't so rapid.

Great software, but not great support.

I've changed my review. Support did sort the issue quickly but please, sort our the UX. It's pretty confusing.

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Amazing Website for API's - Horrible Execution.

Nokia should have stuck to making phones. They rebuilt the website and it's even more complicated than before. Cannot even add a new billing card so our production instances don't have access to critical APIs.

This company uses very dubious charging strategies and if you set up a test account you will end up being charged regardless of actually using the API to process real data. I set up an API to test if it suited our needs but the website said I would need to use a FREEMIUM account which I did but it gave me nothing to actually test with until I gave them my credit card details. Assuming it was to validate me I did this and today received a charge of $40 for not even using the system to process real data! The website charges are deliberately confused and a complete rip off so I strongly advise you stay well away from this company for your own good. I contacted them about the matter and all they sent me was a canned response 3 times. I have since contacted my bank to carry out a chargeback as this company are charlatans and cannot be trusted. Please consider carefully before signing up to ANYTHING they offer.

scummers, I'm getting same image for all my prompts

I subscribed to an api, paid for one month of usage and cancelled the plan 3 days into the subscription. After cancelling the subscription the immediately locked my api access, stating that you need to stay subscribed until the very end of the billing period. I paid upfront for one month of usage. This has nothing to do with a potential continuation of my plan. The terms are set so you can only unsubscribe precisely on the day when your last billing period is over, otherwise they deny to provide you the service you already paid for. Very unfair and shady business.

I’m a developer who had an API listed for 3 months (it was shut down today due to claims of non-compliance with the T&Cs regarding data usage — for those reading this, it’s related to the recent global incident involving LinkedIn providers). Here are my conclusions:

Support Team:
Probably the worst I’ve ever encountered. It's important to note that you don’t get direct contact with a Rapid employee. They've outsourced support to third-party companies, who in turn seem to have outsourced it again — many of the reps appear to be based in the Philippines.

Regarding support for billing and payouts:
I opened three tickets during this time, all assigned to someone named Robert. Each one was closed without a single response. Not even an acknowledgment.

Tech Support:
I only opened two tickets, both handled by Ilan Cohen — decent guy. I honestly don’t know how he’s still around; he seems like the only one actually doing any real work.

For general support, I mostly interacted with Mary Jane Dacumos. It's incredible — according to her LinkedIn, she claims to be an engineer with several years of relevant experience. In reality, it feels like she’s just impersonating the role. Her average response time is 7 days. She can’t properly read or understand what’s being communicated, and she either can’t or won’t provide clear explanations for things like T&Cs. It always felt like she was working from a copy-paste script, just going through the motions.

Website UX:

Poor. Honestly, even a beginner “vibe-coder” could build something better.

There are two statistics pages. Some features work on the older version, others don’t work at all, and some only function on the “updated” one.

Buttons that don’t work (e.g. the collapsible slider).

Major bugs in the Chat feature — if you try to respond to more than three users quickly as a provider, the page crashes and locks into a 404 error.

Final Thoughts:

Overall, a terrible experience. This was my first — and definitely my last — time listing anything here. I’m not sure if this decline is related to the recent acquisition by Nokia, but one thing I can confirm: the negative reviews about this platform are 100% accurate.

Avoid it at all costs — both as a user and as a developer. There are many better platforms out there where you can monetize your work or consume APIs with reliable service and proper support.

I had trouble with aprox. 25-30% of their APIs.

In this Wild West of APIs, RapidApi takes money from clients, takes a comission, but refunds are:

"Regarding refunds, we must contact the API Provider directly because Rapid is an API Hub that enables developers to access APIs and allows API Providers to list and sell their APIs to developers. Rapid does not have ownership or management over any of the APIs on the Public Hub."

At the discretion of the API owner.

And my experience with API owners:
1. One rejected the refund because:

"We decline this request as we only issue refunds if there are major issues with out API."

Then, I ended up demonstrating that:
a) 80% of the api calls failed.
b) they hide their error rate by throwing 200 HTTP status message but showing the error in the body.
c) one endpoint was disabled
d) 2 weeks of no answer from the API owner
e) I only used 300 of 50,000 calls..

API owner posts a screenshot with 2 cases where it actually works. Mind you, I had seen the API work once, then fail within 5 minutes for the same case.

No response after that.

2. Second API.

"We offer a 50% partial refund because we already paid our supplier."

Only 137 calls worked out of 100,000. But I went to sleep and made 23,000 errored calls. Ridorculos.

Economies of scale ? I'm responsible for half of your supplier cost despite using 23% of quota ? Anyway.. I took it. Shame on me. :))

So you really have to beg, innit.

Other bad experiences:
- Some the APIs have huge quotas but break after midnight when their own suppliers reach their quota limits.

- Owners answer with generic: "maintenance", "we had a bug". But you go through the forums and see the same answer every other month. So I'm pretty sure they are hitting quota limits.

- 2 API owners changed their subscription package limits after I've been having issues with large number of calls. In the public support forum, one of API's answers went from "we had a bug, it's fixed" to "strange." When I gave him critical information that would assist his bug fixing.

- One API advertises email gathering from youtube. But they just parse the description, so most of your calls fail if the channel has no email in the description. The API is very expensive. You can get 3,000,000 entries with another api for the price of 60,000 with this one and parsing the description yourself.

- Such price arbitrages are available everywhere. The concious buyer would always pick the most cost effective in this case. Especially if the cheaper option has 100% service level. But all APIs are at 100% SERVICE LEVEL. Because most api owners hide their error rate by always returning HTTP STATUS 200 and the error in the body. So you don't really know the error rate without browsing the forum threads.

- Other APIs that are reliable work with data that is freely available anyway. Just ask ChatGPT for your particular usecase. There may be a public access point. I quickly learned that API data I was paying for is freely available without rate limits or extreme scraping techniques.

- Another API kept returning incomplete information on more complicated usecases.

- Sometimes rapidapi.com goes blank. Their css and js files return 502..

Wild west..

To end on a positive note:
There are some great gems too.
- A few APIs beat industry leader dataforseo in price by 100 fold.

Good luck,
It's best if:
- you can take $25-$50-$100-$200 hits every now and then with bad actors. Refunds are hit & miss.
- your apps are not mission critical.

Thanks.

Don't waste your time and money. Better go somewhere else, there are options.

they keep delaying the payout to the seller, without explaining at all what the situation is, they don't even really keep their promise as estimated, they even increase the estimate

This company really went downhill. When one of the APIs broke, I contacted the author multiple times but never got a response. I tried to cancel and lost access immediately despite having paid for another 28 days. No refund, no delayed cancellation. Emails to RapidAPI support are also ignored.
I suggest staying away.

They had been overcharging the account for months, never sending any receipts or notifying the user of the overcharges, that were 10 to 50 times the subscription price. Instead of upgrading the tier, they continued to charge sums amounting to thousands without informing the primary account holder. A scam website that would definitely be reported to authorities.

This is the worst website I’ve used. They say they’re not responsible for any issues with public API subscriptions and that it’s only between the buyer and seller. How does that make sense for a platform with a monthly subscription and thousands of products? The company doesn’t take responsibility for its service. It feels like they’re allowing fraudulent activity with their public API subscriptions, since no one can take action. Unbelievable!!!! Be aware guys....