I Run 18 Production APIs on a Free VPS. Revenue So Far: $0

A reporter who works shifts at a factory shares his experience of running 18 production APIs on a single free-tier cloud server. The server, an Oracle Cloud Always Free ARM instance, has 4 cores and 24GB of RAM, costing $0 a month. Each API is a small FastAPI app on its own port, managed by a supervisor script that restarts it if it crashes.

RapidAPI serves as the gateway, handling keys, quotas, and billing, eliminating the need to build such features. The setup costs nothing to run. The reporter aimed to learn how real API products function without incurring any expenses. Over two weeks, the catalog expanded to include various APIs such as a background remover, utility APIs, validation APIs, an AI email writer, and a passive website security scanner, which is his flagship product.

Every API offers a free plan, with cheap paid plans available. The GitHub repository serves as the storefront, providing documentation and examples for the APIs. The reporter checked his provider dashboard to verify the numbers: 18 APIs live, one more private, zero paying subscribers, $0.00 in revenue, and only 23 API calls in the last 7 days, all made by the reporter testing his own endpoints during setup.

The main issue the reporter faced was that nobody knew about these APIs. Listing an API on RapidAPI alone proved to be an ineffective distribution strategy. It took two weeks to build the APIs and zero weeks to tell anyone about them. The reporter decided to freeze the catalog and wait for people to find the existing 18 APIs before adding more.

The current plan involves submitting APIs to directories and curated lists, writing posts with real numbers, including the less favorable ones, and keeping the free tiers genuinely usable so that those who discover the APIs can get value quickly.