What are the indications of high-quality developer API businesses?

It varies. I think there's probably three measurement areas that if I were looking at from a FinTech perspective, the first is just purely technology. Are the developer docs updated regularly? Are these developer docs developer friendly? Meaning they can go and do some trial and error in a sandbox. Is the sandbox open to play with, or is it hidden behind a paywall or a firewall?

For example, Synapse was the first ones to have an open developer spec and you could go and play in their sandbox for free. So it helped people to sign up.

That's the technology perspective. You can go into the structuring of the requests themselves, so looking at the details of the API, as it were laid out, is it consistent? Are there clear error messages defined? So there's like tech mindset there. Look at their status page, are they having regular incidents? So wearing a developer hat there. Is there some good coverage? Are they well regarded within the relevant FinTech ecosystems? Is there any bad stuff out there?

If you reach out to the salesperson, do they acknowledge and get back to you quickly?

Does the salesperson take the time to appreciate your business? oOr are they just trying to churn through numbers and not really good grasp of the product you're trying to build?

And then finally, do they have a high number of Fintechs using their service? Can you get a referral from one of their customers? There is a mixture of three there I guess. One is the technology piece; One is the operational piece and one is just a general word of mouth, reputational aspect of it as well.