Because we don't want to do the hard work. We tried it already. We initially started by managing all our own infrastructure, building our own APIs from the ground up and it turns out that's really hard. If anything we can never match the depth and experience of someone who's already doing it. So it just makes more sense to partner. We can probably provide some nice features on top for caching and whatever else to protect the third party API but otherwise the goal is to bring together a fragmented market.

Looking at it another way. I worked on open source for many years. Seeing what AWS has done to open source projects, it's a really dishonourable thing and while I get they're running a business I think there were better ways to go about it than just lifting a project and running it themselves. So for us it's really about building a trustworthy business that empowers individual devs and small teams. And you can't do that if you try to cut out the people who got you to where you wanna go.

Why do support, q/a, maintenance, performance improvement for hundreds API with thousands of quirks when you can sell shovels as if they were made of gold?

In a similar vein, how much visibility does micro API bring to my API compared to established platforms? Even assuming it's a lot, why not just publish my API on all of them?

Why not have an API that publishes your API to all of them?

It’s APIs all the way down.