API Maker FAQ

A self-hosted backend engine. Connect your databases and every table gets secure REST APIs. You, or your AI assistant, write only the business logic in custom APIs, hooks, schedulers and events, and API Maker guards and runs the rest on your own servers.

One licence per server, paid once. Development on your own computer is free. Write to us for prices and for packs for agencies.

Yes. API Maker Launchpad runs API Maker on your computer with a free key: nothing to request, no card. That key is for development on your computer. A server which serves other people needs a licence key.

No. A server only checks its licence: a minute or two after it starts, once a day, and every four hours while a check gets no answer. It sends the licence key, the MAC addresses and the number of CPU cores of the machine. No data of your databases, APIs, logs, code or users, and no usage analytics. A server on the free key of Launchpad sends nothing, and the check never stops a server.

No, it is commercial software. What you build with it is yours: your custom APIs, hooks, schemas and settings are files in your own Git repository, in the languages you chose.

Supabase is a PostgreSQL platform, mostly used as a hosted service. API Maker runs on your own servers and on the databases you already have, Oracle, SQL Server and MongoDB included. Every API is locked by default, your code is checked for data leaks, and you pay once per server instead of by usage.

With a framework, your team writes and maintains every endpoint, access check, cache and deployment step, with or without an AI assistant. API Maker already has the APIs of every table, the access rules, validation, caching, logs, WebSockets and Git deployment: your team writes only the business logic.

Yes. Every page of the docs exists as Markdown, with llms.txt for assistants. The local client puts your code in a Git folder with types for every table, npm run test runs your test cases, and the security report is a file in the repository that an assistant can read and fix. Every commit also writes an AGENTS.md, so Codex, Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot know the layout, the way code is written and the security rules before they start.

Yes. Each developer runs the local client in their own editor with the sync token of the account: a save reaches the others and the admin panel within a second, every line of their terminals says who made the change, and the bar of the admin panel shows who is connected. The connection is encrypted and the sync token never travels. A developer can also get an account of their own, with their own secrets, branch and databases.

MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle, TiDB and Percona XtraDB, several at once, with queries and joins across them.

Yes. A custom API can connect to any database that has a driver in the language you write it in. Add the package of the driver, from npm, PyPI, Packagist, NuGet, Go modules, crates.io or Maven Central, in the sandbox settings and use it in your custom APIs.

TypeScript and JavaScript (on Node.js or Bun), Python, PHP, C#, Go, Rust, Java and Kotlin. Every custom API, hook, scheduler and event listener keeps its own language, and one account can mix them.

API Maker is one program written in Rust, which runs as one process on each server and uses every CPU core. Nothing of Node.js is installed on the server: code you write in TypeScript or JavaScript runs on Node.js or Bun inside Docker sandbox containers, which API Maker builds by itself.

Use the V3 to V4 Migration page of API Maker Launchpad. It keeps your MongoDB and Redis with their data, and puts everything back if a step fails.

Yes. Run any SQL or MongoDB command with executeQuery, call stored procedures, add packages and programs to your sandbox image with your own Dockerfile, and call your other services over HTTP. Apps built on other backends can call the APIs of API Maker too, so a legacy system can move over step by step.

It does not stream video or audio, and long jobs do not belong in a request: every run of your code has a time limit, 13 seconds unless you change it. Run long jobs in a scheduler, or keep such a module as a separate service that calls API Maker.

Write to us from the contact page, or book a demo on your own use case.