I am sure many developers don't remember just how much crappier the "crappier APIs" were. Back when Stripe became popular the alternative was XML and SOAP, docu

I am sure many developers don't remember just how much crappier the "crappier APIs" were. Back when Stripe became popular the alternative was XML and SOAP, documented in an outdated PDF that would get emailed to you, or if you're lucky, hosted behind 3 login walls. Then, once you start integrating, you realize that their dev environment is offline every other request, and doesn't match the production environment. So you just do the work blindly and hope for the best. Having a decent publicly documented API was revolutionary.