API Terms/Methodology
Methodology

How this data is made

The census is only worth anything if you can check it. This page is the contract: where values come from, what "verified" means, what a null means, and where the current limitations are.

Sources

  • Vendor pages only. Every value is extracted from the API vendor's own documentation, pricing or terms pages — never from third-party directories, blogs or forums.
  • Per-field evidence. Each non-null field carries the URL of the exact page that states it. A record whose extraction cites a page we did not crawl is rejected automatically — fabricated sources cannot ship.
  • Polite crawling. Honest user-agent, low request rates, no circumvention. Sites that wall crawlers or render docs only in JavaScript are tracked but not guessed at.

What a null means

  • "not documented" on a record: we crawled the vendor's pages and found no statement for that field. That is a finding, not a gap — an agent should know a vendor documents no rate limit.
  • Tracked, no record: 296 of 1,546 tracked domains currently block crawling or serve JS-only docs. They are retried every cycle and never published as guesses.

Verification & QA

  • Re-verification is scheduled (currently monthly; the cadence stated on each record is the one that applies to it). Source pages are re-fetched and diffed; changed sources trigger re-extraction.
  • 40 golden assertions guard hand-audited records (Stripe, GitHub, OpenAI, Slack…): any build in which one of those verified fields regresses to null fails and cannot deploy.
  • Confidence (high · medium · low) is currently record-level, assigned at extraction; field-level confidence is on the roadmap.
  • Corrections: every page links a correction form; reports are reviewed by a human and re-verified against the vendor source before any change.

Independence

  • Placement, never data. Sponsorship and featured listings buy disclosed visibility. No sponsor can change a record, a field value, a confidence score, or who gets listed. See sponsors.

Known limitations

  • Multi-product vendors (AWS, Google, Twilio…) are currently one record per domain; values are scoped to the primary public API and the provider→product hierarchy is in progress.
  • Category assignment is automated and being human-reviewed; expect occasional misfiles until that pass completes.
  • JS-only documentation sites limit coverage for some vendors (marked in the funnel above).