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In September 2010, the API landscape was a nascent frontier. From a modest one-bedroom apartment in Eugene, Oregon, the API Evangelist project was born out of a desire to decipher the rapidly shifting paradigms of software development—specifically the early, transformative impacts of companies like Twitter, Twilio, and Stripe. What began as a personal blog documenting the nascent "API economy" has, sixteen years later, evolved into a massive, machine-readable repository of digital infrastructure.
Recently, the API Evangelist GitHub organization officially crossed the threshold of 10,000 repositories. Each repository functions as a living profile for a single API provider, ranging from global tech giants like AWS and Salesforce to obscure, niche vertical tools, federal government agencies, and cutting-edge DeFi protocols. This milestone marks more than just a volume achievement; it represents the maturation of a vision to catalog the entirety of the interconnected software world into a navigable, standardized network.
The Chronology of a Decade-Long Build
The path to 10,000 repositories was neither accidental nor instantaneous. It required a twelve-year iterative process to refine an architecture capable of scaling without losing its structural integrity.
2010–2014: The Observational Phase
The early years were defined by observation and writing. The focus was on identifying the patterns of what made an API successful. During this time, the "API Evangelist" brand became a primary source for developers and industry leaders to understand the shift toward API-first business models.
2014–2018: The Standardization Pivot
By 2014, it became clear that human-readable blog posts were insufficient for tracking the velocity of the industry. Working alongside Steve Willmott and other industry pioneers, the development of APIs.json began. The goal was to create a "discovery primitive"—a metadata layer that existed above the API specifications themselves. This allowed for the categorization of resources like OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON Schema, turning a fragmented collection of links into a unified data structure.
2018–Present: Scaling and Governance
The latter half of the project’s history focused on building out the "Standards Layer." By leveraging GitHub not just as a host, but as a collaborative database, the project invited community participation. The infrastructure transitioned from a static library into a dynamic, version-controlled index where the industry’s evolution—such as the rise of FinOps, rate-limiting transparency, and data vocabulary—could be tracked in real-time.
Supporting Data: Mapping the API Landscape
The power of this 10,000-repository network lies in the granular data it produces. By applying a consistent schema across thousands of providers, the project has generated a comprehensive map of where the industry is investing its resources—and where it is falling behind.
Currently, the index contains:
- 10,754 OpenAPI specifications, providing a standardized look at how APIs are defined and communicated.
- 14,123 unique tags, which offer a semantic map of the API economy’s focus areas, from healthcare to financial services.
- 7,836 website links and 6,723 documentation portals, confirming that even in an automated world, human-facing resources remain the bedrock of adoption.
However, the "gaps" in the data are perhaps more revealing than the successes. Only 2,116 providers have published machine-readable pricing (Plans coverage), and only 2,295 have provided accessible documentation on rate limits. These figures indicate a significant "legibility gap." While the technical specs are being produced, the business-critical metadata—the information that allows developers to integrate and budget for an API automatically—is still largely siloed or trapped in unstructured prose.
The Technical Framework: Why APIs.json Matters
The success of this catalog hinges on a fundamental insight: the problem with API discovery is not the lack of data, but the lack of a shared schema.
The apis.yml Source of Truth
Every repository in the organization contains an apis.yml file at its root. This file acts as the "identity document" for the provider. It captures stable identifiers (aid), human-readable descriptions, and critical links to machine-readable artifacts.
By utilizing standardized terms—such as OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, JSONSchema, Plans, and FinOps—the project ensures that any automated agent can parse the repository without requiring custom logic for each provider. This standardization is the difference between a disorganized pile of links and a queryable, global API network.
GitHub as the Governance Engine
Using GitHub as the backbone of the project was a strategic decision. Git version history allows for the tracking of API lifecycle changes: when a pricing model is updated, when a new documentation portal is launched, or when a deprecated API is sunsetted. Furthermore, the public nature of these repositories allows for a "crowdsourced governance" model. If a specification link breaks or a new endpoint is added, the community can—and does—submit pull requests to update the record.
Implications for the Future of Software
The transformation of the API Evangelist blog into a structured infrastructure has profound implications for the next generation of software development.
From Discovery to Governance
The catalog is no longer just a library for developers to find APIs; it has become a governance tool for architects and researchers. By programmatically querying the catalog, an organization can now ask sophisticated questions:
- "Which providers in the Healthcare sector have published a JSONSchema for their data models?"
- "Which financial services APIs provide machine-readable documentation for their rate limits?"
These questions, once requiring manual labor and exhaustive research, can now be answered in seconds. This capability shifts the power dynamic in the API economy, moving the focus from "marketing" APIs to "standardizing" them.
Enabling the Agentic Web
As AI agents become the primary consumers of APIs, the need for machine-readable, standardized documentation will explode. An AI agent cannot "read" a marketing website to understand rate limits; it needs a structured, predictable format. The work done in creating this 10,000-repository index provides the very infrastructure that future AI systems will use to discover, authenticate, and interact with the world’s digital services.
The "Legibility" Mandate
The 78% of providers who have not yet published machine-readable pricing are not necessarily acting in bad faith. They are simply operating in an environment where they have never been asked to make that data machine-readable. By surfacing these gaps, the API Evangelist project creates a "legibility mandate." It signals to the industry that to be a first-class citizen in the modern API economy, one must be as readable to a machine as they are to a human.
Conclusion: A Living Legacy
Sixteen years of effort have yielded a resource that serves as both a historical record of the API revolution and a foundational component of its future. By treating the API economy as an object of study—cataloged, version-controlled, and standardized—the API Evangelist organization has proven that scale does not have to come at the expense of structure.
The next decade will likely see this number grow from 10,000 to 100,000, as the distinction between "software" and "API" continues to vanish. But regardless of the volume, the core principle remains: by creating a common language—a vocabulary of standards—we enable a global, interoperable digital economy that is far more than the sum of its parts. Every apis.yml file is a promise of transparency, and with 10,000 of them now in place, that promise is finally becoming a reality.
Evan Lee Salim
