---
type: "article"
title: "The Demand Report #08 — discovery is free, and judgement is what people tried to buy"
summary: "The Demand Report issue #08 cover — discovery is free; judgement is what people tried to buy. 13,090 attempts on the paid surface, 27 gated resources reached for, and the first pro and business tier requests in the run."
newsletter: "APIs.io"
newsletter_handle: "apisio"
newsletter_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio"
author: "Kin Lane (@kinlane)"
published: "2026-09-07T14:01:58.517Z"
canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio/a/vvYMHvRk"
markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio/a/vvYMHvRk.md"
chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/apisio/a/vvYMHvRk/chat"
body_source: "native"
likes: 0
replies: 0
body_words: 3461
---

# The Demand Report #08 — discovery is free, and judgement is what people tried to buy

*Thirteen thousand requests bounced off the paywall last week, spread across twenty-seven different resources — and the one they wanted most was not a lookup. It was a ranking.*

**Week of August 31 – September 6, 2026 · 27,497 providers · 133,203 APIs**

***

Every Monday I read what people and agents actually typed into [apis.io](https://apis.io/) — the search box and the MCP server — as a demand signal for the API economy. Nobody else has this data, so nobody else can send you this email.

***

## 📈 The Demand Report

Searching apis.io is free. So is reading a provider, an API, a tag, an artifact — the whole catalog, no key required. What costs money is everything that *synthesises* across it: ratings, cohorts, comparisons, gap analysis, stack design.

**Last week, 13,090 requests hit that line and bounced.** Up from 8,426, across **27 distinct resources** where last week reached 19 — and **nine of them had never been touched once in the entire history of this report.**

| Gated resource | Aug 24–30 | Aug 31–Sep 6 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `cohorts` | 0 | **7,187** |
| `security` | 7,242 | 4,481 |
| `scopes` | 196 | 331 |
| `ratings` | 86 | 123 |
| `operations` | 0 | **65** |
| `insights` | 0 | **47** |
| `vcs` | 45 | 35 |
| `resolve` | 0 | **33** |
| `checks` | 0 | **24** |
| `agent-readiness` | 3 | 16 |
| `stack` | 0 | **11** |
| `playground` | 0 | **9** |

`cohorts`** went from never-touched to the single most reached-for resource on the platform.** It is not a lookup endpoint. It scores a *group* of providers together — everyone in an industry, a region, a capability — and ranks them against each other. `/cohorts` answers a plain refusal today:

```javascript
{"error":"upgrade_required",
 "detail":"The cohorts endpoint requires the Understanding or Influence plan."}
```

Read the nine first-timers as a list and they are all the same kind of verb: **cohorts, operations, insights, resolve, checks, stack, playground, enrich, countries.** Rank this group. Break this provider into operations. Tell me what the landscape looks like. Resolve this name to a real thing. Check this claim. Design me a stack.

Nobody spent last week asking the catalog to *find* something. They asked it to *decide* something.

That is a distinction I think the whole discovery category gets wrong. The free part of this business is the index. The part somebody will pay for is the judgement — and the demand log now says so in its own numbers rather than in mine.

### And for the first time, some of it paid

Every request in this log carries the plan its key was issued under. Here is the authenticated end of the table across the run:

| Tier | Aug 17–23 | Aug 24–30 | Aug 31–Sep 6 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `owner` | 48 | 260 | **495** |
| `starter` | 79 | 98 | 26 |
| `pro` | 0 | 0 | **289** |
| `business` | 0 | 0 | **303** |

`pro`** and **`business`** requests appear in the log for the first time.** Authenticated traffic went **358 → 1,113**, and `owner` set a record.

I want to be precise about what that is and is not. These are hundreds of requests, not thousands, and a tier label means the key presented carried that plan — it is not a revenue number and I am not going to dress it up as one. What it does settle is a question I could not answer before: 175 accounts have signed up since July, 57 of them in the first six days of September, and the sign-up mail could never tell me whether anybody *used* the key afterwards. Now something has, on the two plans that unlock exactly the resources 13,090 requests were bouncing off.

### The agent spike did not hold

Last issue's lead was MCP searches at an all-time high of 4,533. Seven days later they read **1,591, down 65%** — the sharpest fall in the series and a share of **0.52%**, the lowest since July.

The series now reads 35 → 42 → 310 → 1,027 → 518 → 1,924 → 2,768 → 2,508 → 4,533 → **1,591**.

Read honestly, that makes 4,533 a spike rather than a step, and the 29-vertical MCP shopping run I wrote about last week a single visit rather than a new baseline. The durable range for agent traffic is still the 1,500–2,800 band this series has occupied since early August. I would rather correct the read one week later than let a record stand as a trend.

### The volume, and the crawler inside it

![This week vs last: total searches +67% to 304.1k, keyless API +74% to 266.7k, unique terms −2.7% to 5,363, MCP searches −65% to 1,591. Footnote: three panels moved on one crawler; the red one is the real number](https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/apievangelist/demand-report/issue-08-scoreboard.917e496d.png)

Total requests went **182,192 → 304,091** and keyless callers **153,634 → 266,651**. Distinct search terms went **5,514 → 5,363, down 2.7%** — the fifth consecutive week of a rising volume line over a flat-to-falling vocabulary line, and the fifth time the honest answer is the small number.

This week the crawler changed its wordlist to something more interesting than a dictionary: **it is walking our own catalog.** Thirty-eight terms in the top hundred sit at six to eight hits each, in alphabetical order, and every one of them is the exact name of an API we publish —

`Aggregated sales` (Toast) · `Asset Usage V2` (Bynder) · `AVM Report` (REA Group) · `Data management data store` (Orange Business) · `Dealer Categories` (Optimizely) · `Fraud Notification Events` (Silverflow) · `Instance Settings` (Clerk) · `Menu Groups` (Toast) · `Network Tokens Events` (Silverflow) · `Pre-chargeback Alerts` (Justt) · `Rep Conversations` (Qualified) · `Track Segments` (Customer.io) · `VDV 463` (The Mobility House) …

Straight down the alphabet from *Aggregated* to *Carbon*, one resource per provider. Somebody is reading the index back to itself. It is noise, and I am pointing at it because it is the third distinct machine to arrive in eight weeks wearing a different costume — a wordlist, then a vertical template, now our own table of contents.

**Concentration is at another all-time low:** the top 100 terms are **1,189 of 304,091 requests — 0.39%.** Strip the crawler and the human vocabulary above it is the usual short list: `weather` (28), `payments` (27), `SMS` (25), `Bloomberg` (13), `football` (12), `webhooks` (12), `RAG` (9), `Taiwan` (9).

***

## 🕳️ The Gaps (demand we couldn't answer)

The pipeline saw **732 raw unmet terms**, dropped 280 as noise, and kept **113** — the lowest genuine unmet count of the run, against 328, 390 and 366 in the weeks before. Volume tripled since mid-August while the number of questions the catalog cannot answer fell by two thirds.

I re-probed all 100 published zero-result terms against the live API this morning. **All 100 still return nothing** — the first clean sweep in eight issues, where previous weeks recovered 14, 19 and 52.

Three candidates were dropped from the list below before it was drawn, because the provider turns out to already be indexed under a spaced name: `homedepot` (3×), `africastalking` (1×) and the provider half of `planradar mcp`. A zero-result is not automatically a gap, and this is the second week running that the squashed no-space domain form is how people type a company they are looking for.

These eight are the real ones, each checked against the live catalog by hand:

![The Gaps — top zero-result searches: signalqub and tripexpert at 4×, schneider m221 at 3×, then planradar mcp, zammad, viessman, labdaq and artfol at 2× each](https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/apievangelist/demand-report/issue-08-gaps.445c0b5a.png)

- **signalqub** (4×) — the sharpest row. SignalQub sells a "zero-auth social media scraping API" — Reddit, Google Maps, YouTube and TikTok as clean JSON, no login, no proxies. A company whose entire product is an API, searched for by product name, and we have nothing. Third week running that a row like this has led the list.
- **tripexpert** (4×) — TripExpert distills hotel, restaurant and attraction reviews out of 70+ travel guides and magazines into one rating. A data product, and data products get looked for.
- **schneider m221** (3×) — the honest one. Schneider Electric *is* in the catalog, with four EcoStruxure APIs — IT Expert, Facility Expert, Transformer Expert, contextualized energy data. The M221 is a Modicon programmable logic controller. Somebody wanted the interface to a piece of equipment on a factory floor, and what we hold is the cloud tier above it. `Modicon` returns zero across the whole index.
- **planradar mcp** (2×) — [PlanRadar](https://apis.io/providers/planradar/) is listed, scores 45.1, and publishes an OpenAPI, a security artifact and a reference. It does not publish an MCP server. The search was right to come back empty on the thing that was actually asked for.
- **zammad** (2×) — open-source helpdesk and ticketing out of Germany, self-hostable, with a documented REST API.
- **viessman** (2×) — Viessmann, the German heating and climate group. Typed one 'n' short, and worth flagging because they run a live developer portal with an IoT API and OAuth behind it. That is not a company hoping to have an API.
- **labdaq** (2×) — CGM LABDAQ, a laboratory information system running in US clinical labs.
- **artfol** (2×) — an art portfolio and social network for artists.

**Two patterns.** The first is now a standing one: companies whose product *is* an API keep turning up in the zero-result list. The second is new — **schneider m221** and **viessman** are both requests for the machine layer: a PLC and a heating system, not a SaaS. Industrial and building equipment vendors ship real interfaces, and this catalog is thin there.

**A correction to last week, while I am here.** I reported that publishing the gap list appeared to create demand for it — all eight of issue #06's names rose four- to eight-fold the following week. That did not repeat. Of issue #07's eight names, seven are flat or gone this week and only `apifootball` rose (2 → 6). One re-crawl of a published list, not a standing effect. The policy of discounting previously-published terms stays, because it costs nothing and it caught `abivax` and `fireapp` returning for a third week.

**If you build in one of these lanes, this is your invitation.** Add your API in about two minutes: [**apis.io/add**](https://apis.io/add) — or point your agent at the [apis.io MCP server](https://apis.io/) and let it submit for you.

***

## 🆕 New to the Index

The catalog stands at **27,497 providers and 133,203 APIs**. Both numbers are *down* on the week — providers by 371, APIs by 1,311 — the second Monday-over-Monday provider decline of the run. Merges, retirements and delistings ran ahead of arrivals. The build and the deployed index agree exactly this week, so every number here is one you can check right now.

|   | Last Monday | Today |   |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| MCP entries (all) | 4,507 | **4,801** | \+294 |
| — of those, hosted endpoints | 1,203 | **1,254** | \+51 |
| Security artifacts | 42,654 | **43,795** | \+1,141 |
| Scopes artifacts | 2,661 | **2,852** | \+191 |

**Follow-through on last issue.** The MCP inventory grew 6.5% and the usable slice of it — an endpoint an agent can actually open — grew 4.3%. Hosted share fell from **26.7% to 26.1%**; the candidate-descriptor pile went 2,131 → 2,305. Growth in the MCP count is still mostly growth in declarations.

### And the catalog moved its own line, mid-week

Last issue argued that the MCP number everyone quotes and the MCP number an agent can use are different numbers. On Wednesday the index started saying so itself, and it cost us the headline.

A provider used to earn the `MCP` artifact type by having a folder in the MCP collection at all. That collection also holds **candidate manifests** — tool lists derived from a crosswalk, self-describing as `status: candidate`, not servers anybody operates. Presence of a folder was never evidence of a server. As of 3 September the credit requires at least one page that is a real server page *and* not a candidate. The pointer type in a provider's own `apis.yml` was renamed alongside it, `MCPServer` → `X-MCPServerCandidate`, so the declaration says what it is.

The effect on the number:

| Providers matching `artifact_types=MCP` |   |
| --- | --- |
| Last Monday | 4,432 |
| **Today** | **2,476** |

**Nothing was deleted and nothing broke.** Of 4,746 provider folders in the MCP collection, **2,279 now earn nothing** — 2,242 of them hold only candidate manifests, and the remaining 37 hold only redirect tombstones from pages that were retired. That leaves 2,467 earning the credit, which is the deployed figure to within nine records. The pages stay browsable; the credit is what got gated, and `find_mcp` rows now carry `status` so a candidate says so on its own row.

I am publishing the before-and-after rather than quietly using the new number, because **1,956 providers stopped being counted as MCP publishers in a week and none of them changed anything.** If you have quoted an apis.io MCP figure in the last month, that is which one you had.

**Which also re-cuts the row above, and I would rather say it than let it sit in a table.** The same change split the summary the artifact line is built from: of **4,801 MCP entries, 2,560 are a real server and 2,242 are a candidate manifest.** So the honest reading of that "+294" is a count of entries, not of servers. When this newsletter has written "4,507 MCP servers" — I wrote exactly that last week — the number included the candidate half. **2,560 is the figure that means what the phrase says**, and it is the one I will use from here.

Two axes are now in play and they are not the same cut, so it is worth being exact about which is which. Of 4,801 MCP pages: **2,242 carry **`status: candidate` (the flag the artifact credit reads) and **2,305 are classified **`Candidate descriptor`** by install method** (the endpoint-shape read from last issue's table). They overlap on 1,984. The remainder is the interesting part — **245 documentation links and 13 things classified as a hosted endpoint self-describe as candidates.** A URL that looks live and a provider that says "this is a guess" are different claims, and until this week only one of them was being counted.

**One number moved the right way.** Providers publishing scopes went **2,660 → 2,824**, from 9.7% to **10.3%** of the catalog. It is the largest weekly move that line has made, and the first time it has cleared ten percent. Security sits at 24,328 providers, 88.5%. The permission gap is still nine to one, but for one week it narrowed.

Published on the blog last week:

- [**The First 81 WebMCP Deployments — 72 Are One Script**](https://apis.io/blog/) — we probed the 730 providers already running a hosted MCP endpoint for the W3C browser-tool draft, with a deliberately narrow test so an article about WebMCP can never score as shipping it.
- [**Archive Writes Down What Its API Cannot Do**](https://apis.io/blog/) — see below.
- [**CloudZero Ships Scopes That Update Themselves**](https://apis.io/blog/) — API keys whose permissions widen as the surface grows, and the trade that makes.
- [**WorkOS: A Transient JWKS Failure Is Not a 401**](https://apis.io/blog/)
- [**APImatic: A Working API Call Was Never the Goal**](https://apis.io/blog/)
- [**Locus Argues for an Orchestration Layer Above Carrier APIs**](https://apis.io/blog/)
- [**Banuba Moves the KYC Reject Loop onto the Device**](https://apis.io/blog/)

All on the [apis.io blog](https://apis.io/blog).

***

## ⭐ Rated This Week: Archive — the second list

*This week's angle: in a week when demand was for judgement, the provider worth reading is the one that made itself judgeable.*

[Archive Technologies](https://apis.io/providers/archive-technologies/) scores **51.0, developing**, with **Agent Readiness 47.8, agent-ready**. It runs a creator-marketing platform — social content, engagement metrics, creator profiles, campaign collections.

It also published a help page that lists what its API **cannot** do.

After the reads and the writes, the page turns around and states plainly that the API cannot create or delete content or creators, cannot send messages, cannot write custom attributes, cannot create or modify workspaces or campaigns, cannot send webhooks, and cannot pull content Archive has not already captured. Nothing is being sold in that second list. It is a page that makes the product look smaller.

It is also the single most useful thing on the site, because a boundary is what an integrator otherwise discovers at 2am — and it is the thing a buyer comparing four vendors actually needs. Most providers publish a surface. Publishing the edge of it is rare.

**I checked the agent surface at the source rather than taking the catalog's word.** An anonymous `initialize` against `app.archive.com/api/v2/mcp` returns **401** carrying *both* halves of a good refusal:

```javascript
www-authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata="https://app.archive.com/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource"
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"error":{"code":-32001,"message":"Authentication required"}}
```

An HTTP client gets a header telling it where to authenticate; a protocol client gets a typed JSON-RPC error it can branch on. Most servers manage one or the other. And the metadata URL is honest: I asked for a `.well-known` path that cannot exist and got a **404**, where last week's provider served the same document from a catch-all.

The API itself is a GraphQL surface at a single `POST` endpoint — **53 operations, 29 queries and 24 mutations, over 135 types**, behind a workspace-scoped bearer token. Runtime introspection is disabled, which is a defensible security posture and also means the published reference *is* the schema. The MCP server maps 53 tools one-to-one onto those operations against the same credit budget, so the agent door and the developer door are demonstrably the same door.

| Facet | Score |
| --- | --- |
| Discoverability | 75.9 |
| Access Clarity | 69.7 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 58.9 |
| Contract Quality | 46.8 |
| Operational Transparency | 42.1 |
| Contract Governance | 4.5 |

**The cheapest points on the table are the twenty-four mutations.** `delegated_identity`, `protected_resource_metadata` and `dynamic_client_registration` are all lit, which almost nothing in this catalog can say — they are lit because the MCP server was built on OAuth instead of a pasted key. What is dark is everything about what happens *after* an agent walks through that door: `agentic_access` unlit, `reversibility_documented` unlit, `idempotency` unlit. Twenty-four write operations, agent-accessible, with nothing published about undo or replay.

Contract governance at 4.5 is the lowest facet on the card and the largest single lift on the composite. And `event_surface_described` is unlit — which Archive already told us, on the page this section is about. When a provider's own boundary list and our rubric agree about a gap, the gap is real and the provider is not the problem.

*Kin Score rubric 0.19.0, scored 2026-09-06. Bands: exemplar 66.5+ · strong 54.3–66.4 · developing 39.3–54.2 · thin 26.2–39.2 · emerging 11–26.1 · minimal 0–10.9. Agent Readiness 0.2: agent-native 38.7+ (gated on idempotency AND error semantics) · agent-ready 28.6–38.6 · agent-aware 5.1–28.5 · human-only 0–5. ****0.18 and 0.19 were structural releases that move no scores****, so unlike most weeks these numbers are directly comparable to last issue's.*

***

## 🤖 Reproduce this yourself

The gate is one call, and the refusal is the point:

```javascript
curl -s "https://apis.io/api/v1/cohorts?limit=1"
```

You get `upgrade_required` and a pointer to the plans page — the same answer 7,187 requests got last week. Everything the free tier *does* answer is one call away too:

```javascript
find_providers(artifact_types=["Scopes"], limit=1, fields=["slug"])
find_mcp(install_method="Hosted endpoint", limit=1)
```

Read `meta.total`: **2,824** providers publish scopes out of 27,497, and **1,254** of the 4,801 MCP entries are an endpoint you can open.

And the re-cut number from this week, which is the one to quote from here on:

```javascript
find_providers(artifact_types=["MCP"], limit=1, fields=["slug"])
```

**2,476**, not 4,432. Same catalog, a definition that now requires a server.

Then check this week's provider without trusting me or the catalog:

```javascript
curl -s -D - -o /dev/null -X POST https://app.archive.com/api/v2/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{}}' \
  | grep -i www-authenticate
```

Or read the demand data directly: [**apis.io/search-terms/**](https://apis.io/search-terms/), refreshed every Monday.

***

**27,497 providers. 133,203 APIs. 13,090 requests last week for the one thing the index doesn't do for free — tell you which of them is better.** See a gap that's yours? → [**apis.io/add**](https://apis.io/add)

*The Demand Report is a weekly read of apis.io's own search + discovery signal. Forward it to someone who ships an API.*

***

## Discussion

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