It’s amazing what an API can do for a website. Provide one, and your programming staff increases exponentially without any additional cost to staffing. You’ll even gain more users and traffic.

APIs could be considered a separate interface, where it doesn’t bring the average user any more capability than your desktop or mobile website can. More resources are devoted to these versions of websites and APIs are put on the back burner because they are for programmers and geeks.

This is true, but APIs strongly affect how websites grow and market themselves. Developers will not take the time to build scrappers to scrap data from your website and then output it in their own format. Furthermore, this process is very clumsy and can be broken by a simple character change.

APIs are more constant and reliable. You want user data? Call the API, provide a user id, and you get a response back that is constant (user data). Developers are motivated to make consistent call to get the data and present it in their own format.

These developers that are enticed with easy to use interfaces will do the work for your company. Because they want to see your website data in their format, there is a benefit for them that doesn’t cost you any more than serving data, which would happen in any format of your website.

These applications that are built usually mention your site by name and provide link to your website. This free marketing to a potentially large audience still didn’t cost anywhere close to the price of ads. And if they cache the data, your servers won’t be hit as much.

Lastly, these application will entice more developers with their own ideas for mashups of your data. And all your engineers needed to do was provide an API and make sure the servers are responding and handling all the data being sent and received.

Without an API, you’re doing all the work, and it’s quite some work for a startup.