Trust is the currency the entire API economy runs on, and it’s more fragile and more political than the technical framing of APIs usually admits. When you build on an API, you’re trusting — trusting that it will behave as documented, that it will keep working, that it won’t change without warning, that the provider won’t compete with you or cut you off, that your data is handled responsibly. That trust is earned slowly and broken quickly, and the power asymmetry between providers and consumers means trust is always at risk of being exploited. I’ve come to see trust as one of the most genuinely political dimensions of APIs, because it sits at the intersection of dependence and power: the consumer depends on the provider, the provider holds the power, and trust is the thin thread that makes the relationship workable. When that trust breaks, the political reality of the power imbalance becomes painfully clear.
The reliability dimension of trust is the most basic, and the API world has a poor track record on it. Can you depend on an API? The honest answer, which I’ve written about repeatedly, is: only conditionally. I wrote in 2012 that APIs are forever — wait, no, they can go away at any time — capturing the fundamental fragility of API trust. Developers extend trust to platforms by building on them, and platforms repeatedly betray that trust by deprecating, restricting, or shutting down the APIs developers depended on. The tension between API owners and consumers that I documented in 2012 is fundamentally a tension over trust: consumers need to trust that the API will remain stable and available, and providers retain the power to change that at will. Every deprecation, every breaking change, every acquisition that disrupts an ecosystem is a withdrawal from the trust account, and the API world has made a lot of withdrawals.
The pricing and transparency dimension is where trust gets concrete in the provider-consumer relationship. I wrote in 2014 that I trust API providers more when API pricing is front and center — because hidden pricing, surprise charges, and opaque commercial terms are trust-destroyers. A provider who is transparent about what their API costs, what the terms are, and how the relationship works earns trust; one who hides the ball erodes it. The same applies to the numbers providers report: I wrote in 2017 about what happens when we lose trust in the reporting numbers our providers feed us — because if you can’t trust the analytics and metrics a platform gives you, you can’t trust the relationship. Transparency is the mechanism through which providers earn consumer trust, which is exactly why the providers most interested in exploiting their position are the least transparent. The politics of trust and the politics of transparency are deeply intertwined.
The trust-and-power connection is the political heart of the matter, and it’s where trust becomes more than a feel-good concept. Trust matters so much precisely because the power is so asymmetric. The consumer who builds a business on a provider’s API has handed the provider enormous power over their fate, and all they have in return is trust — the hope that the provider won’t exploit that power. When platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram betrayed their developer ecosystems, what they really did was exploit the trust developers had placed in them, using the power that trust had granted. This is why I emphasize trust as a political issue: it’s the mechanism through which power is granted and the thing that’s violated when power is abused. The API transparency reports I advocated for, the calls for honesty about access and business models — these were all attempts to build the kind of trust infrastructure that could constrain the abuse of platform power. Trust, in the API economy, is a political settlement between the powerful and the dependent, and like all such settlements, it’s only as good as the powerful party’s willingness to honor it.
The discovery dimension is where I came to see trust as the missing ingredient most recently, and it reframes a lot. I wrote in 2025 that trust is the secret ingredient missing in API discovery — because in a world of hundreds of thousands of APIs, finding one isn’t the hard part; knowing which ones you can trust is. Trust is what discovery actually needs to deliver: not just “here are APIs that match,” but “here are APIs that are reliable, well-maintained, honestly documented, and safe to depend on.” Without trust signals, discovery just hands you a list of candidates with no basis for confidence. This is why the future of discovery, and of the whole API economy, depends on building trust infrastructure — ratings, evidence, provenance, reputation — that lets consumers know not just that an API exists but that it can be relied upon. Trust is becoming the scarce resource that determines which APIs actually get used.
The synthesis I’ve arrived at is that trust is both the foundation of the API economy and its most politically fraught element, and that building genuine trust is the antidote to the abuse of platform power. The whole API economy depends on consumers trusting providers enough to build on them — and that trust is constantly tested by the providers’ power to betray it. Demonstrable trustworthiness — through transparency, reliability, honest pricing, stable terms, and respectful treatment of consumers — is both an ethical obligation and a competitive advantage, because in a world where so many platforms have betrayed their ecosystems, the providers who can be genuinely trusted stand out. But the deeper political point is that trust shouldn’t have to be a matter of hoping the powerful party behaves well. The push for transparency, for regulation, for federated alternatives that don’t require trusting a single corporation, for verifiable trust signals in discovery — these are all attempts to build trust into the structure of the API economy rather than leaving it to the goodwill of platforms that have repeatedly proven that goodwill can’t be relied upon. Trust is the thread that makes the whole API economy work, and the political project around trust is about whether that thread will be protected by structure and accountability or left perpetually vulnerable to the power imbalances it papers over. The API economy runs on trust, and the question of who can be trusted, and how trust is earned and protected, is one of the most important political questions in the whole field.
References
- APIs Are Forever, Wait No They Can Go Away At Any Time
- Tension Between API Owners And Consumers
- API Transparency Report As Essential Building Block
- I Trust API Providers More When API Pricing Is Front And Center
- When We Lose Trust In The Reporting Numbers Our Providers Feed Us
- An Emphasis On The Politics Of APIs
- Trust Is The Secret Ingredient Missing In API Discovery
