Launch HN: Nango (YC W23) – Open-Source Unified API

• nango

  33 4,207 9.9 TypeScript

  A single API for all your integrations.

  

2 min demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/d04c67b47e284e86b91b4b99fba548ec

SaaS engineering teams face a tough choice: they can build each integration in-house from scratch, which gives them full control but takes a lot of time and maintenance effort. Or they can use pre-built solutions, which are fast and easy but less flexible and might not fulfill all customer needs.

Nango combines the best of both worlds. We let you quickly ship custom integrations without building complex infrastructure or diving deep into the quirks of each API. You control the business logic, data models, and customer-specific configurations, like custom field mappings. We handle (O)Auth and run your integrations reliably in production.

Under the hood, your integrations run as typescript “lambdas” on Nango. A typical integration has 3-5 lambdas of 20-50 lines of code each. These lambdas live inside your git repo, are version-controlled with the rest of your app, and get deployed to Nango with a CLI (https://docs.nango.dev/understand/core-concepts).

Our runtime has a built-in scheduler for continuous background syncs, monitoring to know if your integrations run as expected, detailed logging of everything that happens in Nango, and pre-built infrastructure to deal with (O)auth, retries, rate-limit handling, webhook floods, data caching, de-duplication, etc. More here: https://docs.nango.dev/understand/architecture

We have found that ChatGPT and Copilot let you build integrations on Nango very fast without having to learn each API’s intricacies. LLMs are great at figuring out which endpoint to use, what parameters it takes, etc. Paired with our runtime, this lets you build complex, high-scale integrations in hours instead of weeks.

We’ve put a ton of effort into dealing with API complexities, so you don’t have to. Even integrations that looked simple at first ended up forcing us to extend our infra to deal with their quirks and gotchas.

For example, we had to figure out 100+ different OAuth implementations (see https://www.nango.dev/blog/why-is-oauth-still-hard and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713518). We had to deal with a half-dozen non-standard auth methods (Github apps, Stripe apps, Netsuite, etc.), expiring webhooks, ways to deal with data dependencies, weird pagination methods, API keys that change with every API call, dozens of different ways to register for webhooks, etc. It’s a constantly moving target, but it is a challenge we have come to love, and we think the approach makes sense: we specialize in finicky details that vary from API to API—you specialize in making your product great and offering more integrations to your users.

The fastest way to see Nango in action is with our interactive demo here (no signup required): https://app.nango.dev/hn-demo

• gorilla

  51 10,118 8.9 Python

  Gorilla: An API store for LLMs

Do you leverage https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/ at all? If not, perhaps consider if it would solve some pain for you.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io featured

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• rollout

  1 11 8.6 TypeScript
  

If Zapier is your mental model, the use case there is trigger/action workflows which is a different from 2-way sync which I'd say Nango does well. For the former you might want to check out this open-source project I work on: https://github.com/RolloutHQ/rollout

• revert

  11 837 9.5 TypeScript

  Revert makes it incredibly easy to build integrations with any third party API

  

https://revert.dev founder here.

Interesting choice of license here.

Well, ELv2 is not open source. Its source available so you should probably change that not just in the title but also in the post. It is misleading!

That being said, I think open unified APIs have a ton of promise!

It is great to see another player & clearly validates what we're building @ Revert :)

Suggest a related project