We built the marketplace we kept wishing existed
Most teams do not have an API problem. They have an API sprawl problem — six vendors, six dashboards, six invoices, six sets of credentials rotting in six different secret stores, and no single place to see what any of it costs or whether it is up.
Zephiel collapses that into one account. We vet each provider on documentation quality, latency under load, and how fast a human answers a support ticket. Then we put them behind a single key and a single bill, and publish what we measure.
We are headquartered in Houston, Texas, with a regional office in Cape Town covering customers across Africa — which is also why the platform settles in more than one currency and publishes latency per region rather than one global median.
We have been doing this since 2015 — long enough to have been wrong in public a few times and to have written most of it down. The blog archive goes back to the first ten providers.
One integration surface
Every API on Zephiel shares a base URL, an auth header, an error envelope, and a rate-limit contract. Learn it once, use it everywhere.
Free tiers, not free trials
A trial that expires is a deadline. A free tier that never expires lets you prototype on your own schedule and upgrade when traffic justifies it.
Honest limits
We publish real latency percentiles and real uptime per API, including the bad months. Vendor pages that only show green are not telling you anything.
No procurement theatre
Adding a vendor should take a checkout form, not a quarter. One contract with us covers every provider on the platform.
A decade, briefly
2015
Founded after counting seven weeks of procurement to add one API. Four providers, one gateway, one region.
2016
Every endpoint moved to HTTPS the month Let's Encrypt left beta. Per-endpoint pricing rejected for a single flat unit.
2017
Gateway moved to HTTP/2. The status page was rebuilt to generate itself, so a bad day can no longer be edited out.
2018
GDPR tooling shipped ahead of enforcement: export, real deletion, retention limits. TLS 1.3 the month the RFC landed.
2019
Keys gained expiry, age, and last-used tracking, so rotation stopped being a task with no deadline.
2020
Idempotency keys made mandatory on every write. Five years of free tiers that have never expired.
2021
Ten days of dependency archaeology during Log4Shell. Every deployed artefact has carried a bill of materials since.
2022
Per-store billing introduced for multi-storefront retailers, along with per-store keys and usage.
2023
A listing policy for generative APIs: labelled, measured the same way as everything else, never sold as a drop-in upgrade.
2024
The gateway was replaced over fourteen months with no maintenance window and ninety seconds of customer-visible impact.
2025
Ten years. The Multistore API became the fastest growing listing on the platform.
2026
38 APIs, one key, one invoice, and the same latency percentiles published whether or not they flatter us.
Building an API you think belongs here? We onboard new providers every month.
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