Show HN: Zuplo – Programmable, Serverless API Management for Developers
Hey everyone! We are Nate Totten and Josh Twist - co-founders of Zuplo. Zuplo is a serverless, programmable API Management solution that is the fastest way for developers to add features like API Key Authentication, rate limiting, and documentation to their API. With Zuplo you can securely share a new or existing API with customers, partners, or other teams in a matter of minutes.

Throughout our careers, we have focused primarily on building tools for developers. Josh founded Azure API Management at Microsoft, and Nate built many of the early developer experiences at Auth0. We founded Zuplo because we believe that every business can benefit from the power of API Management, but the solutions on the market today are expensive, not developer friendly, and often tailored only for the largest enterprises.

While there are many solutions on the market today for API Management - none provide an amazing developer experience. Current solutions require managing complex configurations, lack extensibility, and require significant infrastructure to run. Your typical API Management experience involves waiting hours for an environment to provision and managing configuration with external tools like Terraform.

Additionally, most API Management products lack extensibility, or what extensibility they do have is cumbersome and unfamiliar. For example, one recent Zuplo customer had a somewhat unique requirement - they wanted to both serve API requests to their users, but also save the value of the request for long-term backup and processing. This went well beyond just caching API responses. With traditional API management solving problems like these is a pain at best or not possible at worst. The solution with Zuplo was to write a simple custom code policy that saved the response body to AWS S3. This is about 15 lines of regular Typescript/Javascript in Zuplo.

With Zuplo, API Management is as easy as deploying a website to Vercel or Netlify. Zuplo natively supports GitOps. All configuration for Zuplo is stored in source, and branches are deployed in seconds. Developers can easily deploy and test every change in a real environment before merging a pull request.

Zuplo is a fully managed solution that is deployed to the edge in data centers all over the world. You don’t need to think about what region you want to run or where your customers might be making requests - we run everywhere. Zuplo works well for customers who run in a single or many locations. Zuplo improves the performance of your API by caching responses and performing checks like authentication and rate limiting closer to your customers.

How it works: Zuplo acts as a proxy for your domain (i.e. api.example.com). Simply make a few DNS changes and Zuplo will serve traffic for your API. You can choose to proxy all routes or a subset of routes. Requests can also be routed anywhere you want - one data center, one API or many. Zuplo allows you to enforce authorization and other security measures at the gateway so you can focus on the code that matters most.

Today we’re announcing a Free (forever) plan for folks looking to get started with API Management, whether you’re a total beginner or a veteran of other legacy solutions. Weekend project, hackathon, side-gig? Give Zuplo and try and let us know what you think.