RapidAPIReviews of rapidapi.com

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.