RapidAPIReviews of rapidapi.com

Integrated an API into my website, but literally 1 day later I noticed an suspicious transaction. After looking this up, it is a 'verification' transaction for scammers. Soon larger transactions would follow. In short: This platform leaked my credit card details.

Here’s a polished, professional version that keeps your tone direct and clear: I've used RapidAPI to host our SaaS API for years. They’ve had issues and the UI has never been great, but I worked with their developers to resolve most of the problems. However, they just increased their fee from 20% to 25% of our monthly payout without any warning.

I have been an API provider on RapidAPI for over two years. Overall, I like the platform and want it to improve, which is why I am writing this review. This perspective is from a provider, not a consumer. To keep things fair, I will split this review into three parts: the good, the questionable, and the bad. The Good: I have always received my payouts. Delays were rare and always resolved. Creating and updating APIs is easy. Uploading an OpenAPI specification or a Postman Collection saves time, reduces errors, and makes the process much smoother. The built-in testing suite is useful. I can test endpoints and run automated tests. Email reports show successes and failures, it would be better though if specific failed tests were included (there are also issues, more on that later). API versioning works well. Creating new versions, releasing them, and deprecating older versions is relatively simple. Messaging and announcements are helpful. Communicating directly with customers is a useful feature. Communication with RapidAPI staff has generally been pleasant, and issues I raised were mostly resolved. Questionable Aspects: Fees increased from 20% to 25%, without visible improvements to justify it. The platform overall feels relatively inactive, with few updates and little communication or social-media posts about changes. Some decisions are confusing. For example, messages were moved from Studio to Console without explanation. The MCP playground is risky. Automated agents already heavily bombarded my APIs, and without clear overage controls or refund policies, this adds risk for providers. Navigation is a major issue. Users are redirected to the playground instead of the main API page when clicking on a search result, and many never see the documentation. This leads to faulty requests and fewer direct messages with questions or feedback. There are also UX problems. Ratings default to one star, and users have to click their selected rating twice to prevent it from being submitted incorrectly. Messages and announcements are mixed together, which makes it difficult to find one-to-one conversations with users after sending announcements. Email notifications are inconsistent. Sometimes there are none, and sometimes the same notification is sent multiple times. The testing suite, while useful in theory, is unreliable. Tests sometimes fail even when endpoints are working and my own test scripts pass, which can negatively impact public metrics. The Bad: RapidAPI has serious problems with spam and scams. Many listings are not real APIs but redirect users to external platforms or questionable services. The scale of this issue is significant. For example, searching for “LinkedIn” returns around 1700 results, most of which are not actual APIs. Searching for “Buy LinkedIn accounts” returns over 1400 results consisting almost entirely of spam or scams. Similar problems exist for Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms. Crypto-recovery scams are also widespread. Searching for “crypto recovery” returns hundreds of results that follow the same pattern, redirecting users to external messaging platforms or suspicious websites. These scams also appear in discussions, and providers have to deal with them directly. (Quick side note: if you ever have crypto stolen, recovery services promising to get it back are scams and will take even more from you.) Refund policies are unclear, and overages are billed after usage rather than upfront. This creates situations where usage is never paid for. These spam and scam issues are known to RapidAPI. I reported it back in September 2025 in an email and received a response stating that such reports are taken seriously. However, the situation has not improved. This lack of quality control harms both users and providers and significantly damages the platform’s credibility. Conclusion: RapidAPI has good ideas and useful features, but the current state is disappointing. Between weak communication, inconsistent design decisions, and widespread spam and scams, the experience as a provider is frustrating. For a new consumer, it is likely even more confusing.

Rapid has really fallen downhill in recent years. It's a real shame to be writing this. I used to love RapidAPI as a consumer, to the point where I started distributing my own APIs on there when I first launched my business. Since then, however, the company has really fallen flat. Multiple silly little bugs, like the tab title being "Create React App Sample", meaningless errors stating "Something went wrong" when loading a page (successfully), usage alert emails being completely useless. 3XX responses causing users to be billed multiple times, etc. When I saw Nokia had taken over, I had hoped that it would be the start of a bit of an improvement. But about a year has passed and it's no better. I've had a user payment fail, and honestly, I'm not bothered to chase it up with them. The overage payment forgiveness process is absolutely insane, and the lack of mobile responsiveness of the dashboard is just embarrassing. And after all of this, they have the nerve to bump fees up to 25% to cover their costs. I could live with this if I actually saw some intent to improve the system, but I've already got my own overhead costs, and 25% + the overhead costs and having to update my code to facilitate requests from Rapid, it's just not worth it anymore. I'm not really asking for much. To be completely honest, I've built my own account system and payment handling off platform. It's a million times easier to use than Rapid, I can manage and update things myself when and how I want to. Implementing this has also highlighted to me that their product really isn't that complicated. Nokia, stop trying to squeeze every penny out of Rapid without putting anything back in. Either kill the product or revive it. It's honestly shocking that you have decided to push your fees onto the providers. Presumably you're trying to squeeze out some more money to cover up for terrible management, but a better API marketplace will/has already come around, and people will move onto their own platforms. It's so sad to see what was a great service turn into a complete and utter failure.

Started getting charged thousands due to consistently going over limit which was ten fold above the expected. Went unnoticed for a while. Upgraded to the next tier and guess what, all of a sudden the spikes completely dropped so that I never really needed to upgrade. This was also around the time they were gettin acquired by Nokia. Avoid at all cost.

Takes them 3 Weeks to initiate a 25$ refund for some reason, even tho the vendor of the API responded within 20min. Shoutout to Scrapeninja, the guy responded within 20min, but rapidAPI isn't so rapid. Great software, but not great support.

I've changed my review. Support did sort the issue quickly but please, sort our the UX. It's pretty confusing. --- Amazing Website for API's - Horrible Execution. Nokia should have stuck to making phones. They rebuilt the website and it's even more complicated than before. Cannot even add a new billing card so our production instances don't have access to critical APIs.

This company uses very dubious charging strategies and if you set up a test account you will end up being charged regardless of actually using the API to process real data. I set up an API to test if it suited our needs but the website said I would need to use a FREEMIUM account which I did but it gave me nothing to actually test with until I gave them my credit card details. Assuming it was to validate me I did this and today received a charge of $40 for not even using the system to process real data! The website charges are deliberately confused and a complete rip off so I strongly advise you stay well away from this company for your own good. I contacted them about the matter and all they sent me was a canned response 3 times. I have since contacted my bank to carry out a chargeback as this company are charlatans and cannot be trusted. Please consider carefully before signing up to ANYTHING they offer.