We all need to be more open with our customer’s data; where does it come from, how is it structured and used. Users should not be deterred from getting at their data and all our customers deserve more than a data dump. We are going to expose all the API requests on our apps, even our closed products.
Budget Pro
Budget Pro is our first commercial App under the Costs to Expect umbrella, it is not open source. It is the sibling to Budget, our free and open-source budgeting tool. Like everything under the Costs to Expect name, the App uses the Costs to Expect API. The Costs to Expect API is open source; it always has been and always will be.
Open
Being open is so important to us that anything we create which consumes the API, you could recreate for yourself. Our free Apps and game scorers are open source so you can extend them. We want you to use our tools but if you want to use your own, that is more than fine, over time we hope more developers will leverage our API. We appreciate that right now our API isn’t ready for prime time, we need to improve our test suite and finish rewriting our documentation.
One of our core philosophies is to be as open as possible. To support this, we will expose all API GET. HEAD and OPTIONS requests within Budget Pro. We don’t expose POST and PUT requests as you can’t review them after the fact without caching data which is troubling.
We are not gatekeeping your data. Ideally you will access your API data using out Apps, but you don’t need to. You can access the API directly, use an App created by another developer or create an App yourself, it is up to you.
Requests table
At the bottom of each page there will be a table which shows any API requests that were made to generate the page. The table will show the URI, request method, the response time, and some other nerdy values. To see an example, please check out our social experiment, it has been showing the same data since 2019. Budget shows similar data when you are signed-in. When we update our game scorers, we will add the same requests table.
We appreciate that to many users; this data is redundant. However, over time we believe the number of users who care will increase significantly. In the long term we think our effort will be appreciated and we hope to not be in the minority of Apps showing the data.