A public API is an interface that external developers can use to integrate with your product. Public APIs are designed as stable contracts. They are documented, versioned, and supported, because third parties build business-critical workflows on top of them.
What Public APIs Usually Provide
A public API often exposes core actions like creating resources, updating settings, and retrieving data. In email tooling, it may wrap an email API for send operations, templates, or analytics. Many products secure public APIs with OAuth integration or other token-based schemes, and they define scopes that map to real customer permissions.
Stability, Limits, and Developer Trust
A useful documentation practice is to provide “happy path” examples and “failure path” examples side by side. Developers care about what happens when things go wrong. If you document common error codes and recommended retry logic, you reduce support load and improve integration success.
Public APIs must be predictable. That means clear error messages, backwards compatibility, and careful change management. Rate limiting is a standard part of that contract. When you publish API rate limits, you are setting expectations about throughput and fairness. If limits change, communicate it clearly and provide guidance for queueing and retries.
Event-Driven Integrations
If you expose events, be clear about delivery guarantees. Developers need to know whether events can be delayed, duplicated, or delivered out of order. Document ordering rules and provide guidance for reconciling state using API reads when needed.
Public APIs work best when paired with event notifications. If developers can call the API and then receive webhooks events when state changes, they can build responsive systems without polling. This is especially useful for template publishing, delivery updates, and provisioning workflows in multi-tenant products.
Public API and Topol
Topol is built for developer integration, helping teams embed editing and manage templates in ways that fit public API contracts and event-driven architectures. Learn more at Topol or sign up at Topol signup.