FEATUREDfounderproduct
Why APlicious exists: One key. Every API.
Why I built a unified API platform instead of another single-purpose API — one key, one auth model, one billing relationship across every namespace.
6 min readRead article
Engineering & Product
The APlicious Blog
Engineering deep-dives, product decisions, and the thinking behind building APlicious.
engineering legal
How we built the /legal namespace: 30 endpoints across 22+ jurisdictions
Jurisdiction comparison, document generators, compliance checklists — how APlicious built a 30-endpoint legal data namespace without claiming to be a law firm.
7 min
engineering property
Building a 20-endpoint property and mortgage calculator API
How APlicious built mortgage amortization, affordability, stamp duty, capital gains, and a weighted neighborhood-scoring calculator — and why we mark every endpoint's data provenance in the source.
6 min
tutorial weather
How to build a weather app with one API call (city name in, full conditions out)
A practical walkthrough of building a weather widget on APlicious — current conditions by city name, 16-day forecasts, and severe weather alerts, with real request/response examples.
5 min
tutorial finance
How to build a SIP and compound interest calculator with one API
Building an investment growth calculator on APlicious — SIP future value, compound interest with custom compounding frequency, and a year-by-year breakdown, with the real formulas behind both endpoints.
5 min
tutorial jobs
How to build a job board with search, salary data, and resume scoring
A practical walkthrough of the /jobs namespace — listing search, salary estimation, and an action-verb-aware resume scorer — for builders putting together a job board or career tool.
6 min
engineering rag ai
Why we built /rag from scratch instead of self-hosting RAGFlow
RAG doesn't require a self-hosted platform — how we built document upload, embeddings, and cited Q&A as four ordinary Next.js routes on top of Supabase pgvector, instead of standing up RAGFlow's 16GB Docker stack.
5 min
tutorial numerology
How to build a numerology app: life path, destiny, and compatibility
A practical walkthrough of building a numerology app on APlicious — life path number, destiny number, and a three-factor compatibility score, with real request examples.
5 min
product founder
The math behind our $19 / $49 / $199 pricing tiers
Why APlicious prices at $19 Starter, $49 Growth, $199 Scale instead of usage-metered billing — and the competitor research that moved Starter from $9 to $19.
5 min
tutorial fitness
How to build a fitness tracker: one-rep max, training zones, and workout plans
Building a fitness tracker on APlicious — one-rep max using three averaged formulas, heart-rate training zones, and a structured workout plan generator, with the real math behind each.
6 min
engineering hr
Building a payroll calculator that's actually correct in 26 countries
How APlicious' /hr namespace implements real, country-specific payroll deduction logic for 26 countries instead of one generic tax formula scaled by exchange rate.
6 min
tutorial legal
How to build a legal document generator SaaS on top of /legal
A practical guide to building a 'generate your terms of service' tool using APlicious' /legal namespace — conditional clause assembly, not fill-in-the-blank templates.
5 min
engineering founder
How we source real (not fake) data for 34 API namespaces
APlicious marks every route's data provenance in source comments — owned datasets, free proxies, and named pure-computation formulas. Here's the taxonomy and why it exists.
6 min
tutorial travel
How to build a trip budget calculator: cost of living, currency, and flight distance
Building a travel budget tool on APlicious — three-tier cost-of-living data by city, real great-circle flight distance, and currency conversion, with real request examples.
5 min
engineering dx
Why every endpoint returns the same response envelope, even error responses
The two functions — apiSuccess and apiError — that every one of APlicious' 400+ endpoints calls to format its response, and why a single shared shape matters more than it sounds like it should.
4 min
engineering
How we built automated health-check monitoring for 34 namespaces
A twice-daily cron that samples one real endpoint per namespace, writes results to a history table, and only emails when something's actually broken — no daily noise.
5 min
tutorial
How to build a recipe app with 100 originally-authored recipes
Building a recipe search, random-recipe, and cuisine-browse app on APlicious — and why every recipe is written for the platform specifically, with zero scraped or licensed third-party content.
4 min
tutorial education
How to build a study app: university lookup and quiz generation
Building an education tool on APlicious — university search backed by a real ingested dataset, and a quiz generator with explanations and difficulty tagging, not random multiple-choice.
4 min
tutorial finance
How to build a crypto and stock dashboard with live Yahoo Finance data
Building a portfolio dashboard on APlicious — live stock and crypto quotes, a top-100 leaderboard, and the Crypto Fear & Greed Index, all key-free on our upstream end.
5 min
tutorial domain
How to build a domain lookup tool: WHOIS, DNS, SSL, and security checks
Building a domain intelligence tool on APlicious — RDAP-based WHOIS lookup, DNS records, SSL certificate checks, and SPF/DMARC email security, with the real upstream behind each.
5 min
tutorial hr
How to build an employee onboarding tool with structured checklists
Building an HR onboarding tool on APlicious — role and company-size-aware onboarding checklists, org chart role definitions, and a handbook outline generator.
4 min
tutorial wellness
How to build a wellness app: mood tracking, stress scoring, and sleep quality
Building a wellness app on APlicious — multi-factor mood tracking with CBT-style reframes, a six-factor stress score, and sleep quality analysis, with real request shapes.
5 min
engineering
How email and phone validation actually works under the hood
Real MX record lookups, a curated disposable-domain blocklist, and libphonenumber-js for phone parsing — what /email/validate and /phone/validate actually check versus what a regex-only validator misses.
5 min
tutorial vehicles
How to build an EV range calculator that accounts for cold weather and driving style
Building a real-world EV range estimator on APlicious — temperature penalty for cold-weather battery loss, HVAC load, and driving-style multipliers, not just a flat battery-kWh-to-range ratio.
5 min
tutorial finance
How to build a DCF valuation tool with terminal growth and a discount rate slider
Building a Discounted Cash Flow valuation calculator on APlicious — projected cash flows, terminal value, and intrinsic value, with the real formula and parameters behind /finance/dcf.
5 min
engineering finance
What went into the /finance namespace — stock quotes, forex, EMI, crypto
How the APlicious finance namespace sources and normalizes stock quotes, forex rates, EMI calculations, and crypto prices from key-free upstream sources.
8 min
engineering redis rate-limiting
How we built per-plan rate limiting with Upstash Redis + sliding window
Why sliding window beats fixed window rate limiting at scale, and how APlicious implements per-plan limits with Upstash Redis in a single auth middleware call.
7 min
engineering numerology
Building a production Pythagorean & Chaldean numerology engine in TypeScript
How APlicious implements life path, destiny, karmic debt, challenges, and pinnacle numerology calculations in TypeScript, and the ambiguous rules we had to pick a side on.
10 min
engineering payments razorpay
Accepting both INR and USD with a single Razorpay integration
Why APlicious chose Razorpay over Stripe for an India-first SaaS, and how a single integration handles currency detection, order creation, webhook verification, and idempotent plan activation.
5 min
product dx
Why developer experience is the only moat that matters for API platforms
APILayer has more namespaces, RapidAPI has more traffic — neither invested in developer experience. Why DX, not endpoint count, is the real moat for an API platform.
4 min
Ready to ship with APlicious?
One key. 34 live namespaces. Start free — no credit card required.
Get your free API key