JigsawStack 1.0 - The missing piece to your stack
Published: 2023-11-01 10:31:49

JigsawStack is the missing piece that brings all the APIs you need into one unified platform, delivering high reliability, speed and straightforward pricing. We’ve built it from the ground up to be blazing fast and DX-friendly.

**Check out [JigsawStack here](https://jigsawstack.com) or dive into [our docs here](https://docs.jigsawstack.com).**

![JigsawStack’s landing page](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/89l0c42010y05ij40774.png)

# Unifying Your API Needs

Let's take a step back in time to the 1950s, when the concept of an API was born, enabling two computers to communicate. Fast forward to today, and APIs have evolved into the very foundation of the internet, revolutionising how companies interact with the world. At its core, an API is all about access, providing a gateway for innovations to reach anyone with an internet connection.


## Why does JigsawStack exist?

Despite significant advancements in infrastructure technology, APIs, surprisingly, remain slow, expensive, and a source of frustration for developers trying to integrate them. Many projects rely on more than 50 APIs, each costing upwards of $30 per month, with developers spending countless hours studying and integrating each one.


![Example of a typical 3rd party API stack when building a platform](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/t2uf1ol1q72w879nrw6b.png)

Example of a typical 3rd party API stack when building a platform

Imagine building a simple e-commerce site; here are just a few of the APIs you might need:

- Currency APIs:  To localise to individual markets
- Image CDN: Speeding up content loading times
- Logging: Tracking user purchases and interactions
- AI: Automating custom sales emails to customers
- Country/City dropdown: Allowing users to select their location during sign-up or checkout
- Translation: Bridging the gap to global markets

Each of these APIs typically comes from a different provider with varying costs, integration challenges due to varying API conventions, outdated documentation, and inconsistent performance. Selecting an API for any of these services alone can take days.

> **The mission is clear:** Centralise commonly used APIs to reduce cost, create consistency and improve developer experience while maintaining reliability and performance.
> 

## Why now?

Kudos to the OGs: Vercel, Supabase and Stripe for setting a high bar on developer experience. Companies like these are reshaping how developers operate, shifting the focus away from DevOps and maintaining reliability by delivering software that just works. This shift enables businesses to grow and adapt rapidly while maintaining a high level of stability.

While almost every facet of the developer world is becoming more infrastructure-light, cost-effective, and accessible, it's time to revolutionise APIs.

# JigsawStack: The breakdown

![Groups of APIs provided by JigsawStack](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4v8kgf9xgfsivhnxxhgl.png)

### Which APIs would we bring under our umbrella?

To be clear, we're not out to encompass every API under the sun. Our focus is squarely on bringing commonly used APIs into a single, cohesive platform. In other words, JigsawStack's API suite grows horizontally rather than trying to be a one-size-fits-all vertical solution. While APIs like payments, HR, and CRMs require in-depth understanding and vertical growth, APIs such as currency, localization, geocoding, and certain AI services have a broader, more horizontal utility.

# Product pillars

## 🧑‍💻DX (Developer experience)

Since the inception of JigsawStack, DX has taken centre stage in every facet of our API development. It's a journey of continuous improvement, fueled by inspiration from industry leaders like Stripe and Supabase, who have set the gold standard for developer interaction with technology.

Some questions we ask ourselves to guide our API direction:

- Where and when will these APIs be used in the real world?
- Do we need all these optional parameters in the request body?
- How many API parameters can we preset to work seamlessly out of the box for most use cases?
- How can we provide flexibility for advanced users while maintaining simplicity?
- Should we build or buy? Does building provide significant cost savings and performance?
- How would this API look if we built a UI around this?
- How can we integrate this API into our existing suite, based on common use cases?
- And many more….

**Interactive** **Documentation (Powered by [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com/))**

Mintlify gives our API documentation superpowers, aligning perfectly with our goal of enhancing DX and speeding up time to market. This feature enables you to easily test and execute all our APIs within the documentation itself. Get hands-on with our docs [here](https://docs.jigsawstack.com/introduction).


![[JigsawStack documentation](https://docs.jigsawstack.com) powered by [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com/)](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1q6sc2geqbzwzq7cugmr.png)

**Logging & Analytics**

One of the biggest pain points of any API is horrible logging. We’ve built robust logging with integrated analytics for all our APIs right in the dashboard. This allows for easy debugging, usage tracking, and provides insights into how and who is using your APIs.

![JigsawStack dashboard logs page](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/d6nka7lccld87iu1s5s1.png)

**One API**

Unlike many of the API marketplaces out there, we aren’t a marketplace or an aggregation of APIs. With JigsawStack, all you need is one API route to gain access to all 40+ APIs in an instant.

```bash
https://api.jigsawstack.com/v1/<service_route>
```

## ⚡Speed

**Infrastructure**

Centralization results in shared infrastructure, ensuring that all our APIs run consistently and predictably. Most of our services are built from the ground up on scalable serverless infrastructure, capable of infinite growth while maintaining high reliability and uptime.

- Data & Caching
    - Serverless postgres: High uptime with duplicated read nodes to keep data close to your users.
    - Upstash Redis: Data-related endpoints are stored on Redis, with globel nodes strategically positioned to offer near-real-time API responses.
- Servers
    - Cloudflare workers - All API logic run as close as possible to the request location capitalising on the edge while effortlessly scaling.
    - Deno - Heavier APIs that require extensive processing.

**Edge**

![Edge note locations based on Cloudflare network](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/nawopkt06k79s57onvvj.png)

Why does the Edge matter so much? We firmly believe it represents the future of networking. Innovators like [Turso](https://turso.tech/) and [Cloudflare](https://workers.cloudflare.com/) continuously push the boundaries, bringing infrastructure closer to users and making APIs faster than ever before. Leveraging these modern advancements in our infrastructure allows all our APIs to operate at sub-millisecond speeds, enabling us to deliver top-tier APIs.

## 🔐**Security and Compliance**

Cybersecurity is a massive concern in its own right and one we take very seriously. According to [this report](https://www.embroker.com/blog/top-cybersecurity-threats/) and numerous case studies, social engineering stands as the top cybersecurity threat. Human error is a challenge that can be mitigated by fostering strong security practices, both through internal policies and adherence to global standards.

**API Keys: The age old way for access**

![JigsawStack dashboard API key creation UI](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gubhbgo2ci6kesegjam1.png)

JigsawStack has two types of keys:

*Secret keys:* Gives access to all APIs, meant for backend communication and should never be exposed to a user.

*Public keys*: Offers flexibility by allowing you to limit access to specific APIs and whitelist particular domains. These keys serve both frontend and backend access.

Embracing Zero trust methodology, we encourage creating unique keys for each of your platform or access point, preventing a single exposed system from affecting the rest.

**Compliance**

While we’re in our early days, compliance is a significant goal and a requirement required by many companies. Our roadmap includes achieving SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance. Although these certifications might not serve as active indicators of security standards, our long-term commitment includes conducting annual security audits.

Some things we are already doing to safeguard you:

- Automated penetration testing
- DDoS protection
- Cloudflare WAF
- Passwordless sign-in
- AES-256 data encryption for user data storage
- TLS for data in transit
- Granular API key permissions
- Automated backups
- Taking a Zero trust approach

## 💸Cost

> 💡 With shared infrastructure comes cost savings.

**Economies of scale**

As we grow, technology becomes more affordable. Innovations make server costs cheaper, and as more of you use JigsawStack, it enables us to negotiate better deals with our service providers, passing those cost savings on to you.

![Graph showing lowering of average cost as company scales](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gxhdrf734wy09uuvkscd.png)

**New technology**

Returning to our mission of making technology accessible, reducing costs plays a significant role. Unfortunately, accessibility sometimes counters cost, especially with new and highly anticipated technologies. Consider AI, its expensive, GPUs are expensive. We remain committed to providing access to cutting-edge technology, relying on developer contributions to open-source work to lower costs and remove gatekeeping from disruptive tech.

## ♾️Accessibility & innovation

![Image generated with JigsawStack API with the paragraph below as the prompt](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/z5cyps15j8d1ofwgtp9u.png)

**Vertical growth vs Horizontal growth**

Many companies focus on vertical growth which makes sense, since depth drives your USP, allowing companies to build stronger defendability and nurture loyal customers. While this approach makes sense, it often slows down innovation and hinder accessibility to new technology.

Here's where we stand apart: JigsawStack's focus is on horizontal growth, making us selective about which API services to provide. This approach empowers us to utilize a consistent framework to determine the depth of each of our APIs, based on your feedback and market trends. It also enables us to rapidly expand our API suite to incorporate the latest innovations, offering your products easy access to cutting-edge technology without the need for additional API integration.

**Individual API Growth**

When we adopt an API category, each API undergoes a continuous cycle of development, improvements, and updates. We don't subscribe to a "build once and forget" approach. JigsawStack is always on the lookout for how can we make things better.

For instance, when OpenAI released GPT-3, it sparked a huge growth spike in the entire AI scene. New Open source LLMs were released, generative AI with stable diffusion transformed content generation and much more. Take generative AI, we have an [API here](https://docs.jigsawstack.com/api-reference/ai/image-generation) that allows you generate image with the power of stable diffusion or DALL-E 3 and it’s preconfigured to get amazing results from just a simple prompt. But we went a step further, integrating additional open-source variations of stable diffusion giving access to more styles and a bigger playground.

**No-code friendly**

![Example of JigsawStack workbench UI of the Link shortener API](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qzs3xestsydhnvkotvbu.png)

We're currently in the early stages with our v1 dashboard, but we have big plans on the horizon. At JigsawStack, we have a fundamental principle when it comes to API development: a UI-first approach. This means that before we embark on creating any API, we carefully examine the practical use cases of the user interface and work backward to determine the necessary request fields, all with the goal of keeping things as user-friendly as possible. Nearly all of our APIs feature custom user interfaces called *“Workbench”*, designed with our no-code enthusiasts in mind.

*Our design mantra:*

> 😆 Make it simple enough that even your marketing team can use it.

# 🧩 Building the missing piece..

## Where are we now?

We’ve launched JigsawStack 1.0 in Beta and this is just beginning. The fun part, we will never run out of things to build. The hard part is everything else, well, we love it just as much as the fun part

## What’s next?

**Our next product milestone is to achieve the following:** 

- Improving our dashboard UI and API workbench
- Displaying interesting insights based on your API usage
- Increasing stability
- Providing SLAs
- No-code automation integrations like Zapier
- Forging partnerships and integrations with related ecosystem providers

## How you can help?

- Utilise [JigsawStack](https://jigsawstack.com) in your projects
- Follow us on [X (twitter)](https://twitter.com/jigsawstack) for the latest updates
- We are seeking a developer relations role with marketing background. If that’s you and you believe in what we do, reach out to us!
- Contact us at hello@jigsawstack.com for everything else: feedback, support, angel investors or even to share a Joke 😁