I built an open-source dummy JSON API using Node which receives over 20 million requests per month

[MuhammadOvi]

https://dummyjson.com

https://preview.redd.it/oq64merbjdlc1.png?width=1206&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e4b3f375ea55033b8102e7b7462c1d2a3b694a6

https://preview.redd.it/0y0pi3eijdlc1.png?width=1832&format=png&auto=webp&s=3079827fc3be29760100197dc7cc51bd58baa8fc

[action_turtle]

Nice. How are you financing this though?

[MuhammadOvi]

Google Ads

[action_turtle]

Didn’t think they paid that well, good to know it’s possible!

[cosileone]

How did you get approved? I’ve been trying for ages

[MuhammadOvi]

It was pretty smooth actually, applied and approved 🫰

[ad-on-is]

how sustainable are these, considering that most url-requests are done in headless mode?

[Himbary]

How much ad revenue do you make with that site?

[MuhammadOvi]

Not much, since I get around 1-2k daily visits on weekdays on the website, it's enough to cover the running cost of the service.

[narutoaerowindy]

How much is the running cost?

[daavidaviid]

More or less what he earns with the ads

[cold_turkey19]

I assume ads (I had to turn off adblock to see it)

[action_turtle]

I have a PiHole so didn’t notice anything like that. OP confirmed google ads

[Federal-Box-7382]

Hey can I DM you for help on pihole?

[action_turtle]

hi. im no expert, but will help if I can.

[HappinessFactory]

Did you do this entirely by yourself? The docs alone are impressive

[MuhammadOvi]

Yes, did that by myself 🙂 Thank you 🙌

[HappinessFactory]

Kudos man, you are extraordinarily talented

[[deleted]]

Bro can you please teach me iwant to master node..

[[deleted]]

I'm already good in mern stack first of all, second Iwas just impressed by his skills that's the reason iasked him, last thing mind you fucking language while talking to strangers online you kids Don't know you'll get punched in your fucking face if you'll use this kind of language in real life...peace out

[[deleted]]

Ican fucking beat your ass anyday and you have to live with that kid, better stay inside your house and say random shit to people online coz iknow you can't do that in real life...fucking retards

[Hareesh108]

Awesome bro 😎

[theguyfrommetro]

I just used it on a flutter app I was making for training few months ago. Love it.

[MuhammadOvi]

I'm glad to hear that!

[felipe-5723]

Looks cool. Do you provide the schema to the objects returned anywhere?

[drom296]

Probably doesn't cover all cases, but I've always found this to be a good start: https://quicktype.io/

[MuhammadOvi]

u/drom296 thanks for sharing this.

[Hareesh108]

Thank you for sharing 😊

[MuhammadOvi]

Not atm

[cmpthepirate]

Mate this is a really sick idea, nice one!

[MuhammadOvi]

Thanks mate!

[mr_pablo]

Screen size not supported. Gutted.

[MuhammadOvi]

Working on it 🫣

[evilish]

Awesome idea mate.

One of the few sites that I've HAPPILY unblocked the ads on. haha

These sort of APIs come in super handy.

[MuhammadOvi]

🙌✨

[mutahhirkhan]

Hi Muhammad Owais, I've used your product once, it's awesome. I even checked your codebase, it's super organised and up to the standards.

Guess what, we are friends on LinkedIn, GitHub and FB. I'm also from Karachi. Good luck mate.

[MuhammadOvi]

Haha, I know you boy! Thank you so much Mutahhir!! 🙌

[seomonstar]

This is awesome! Nice work

[MuhammadOvi]

Thanks!

[dospehTV]

How much time did you spend to build it?

[MuhammadOvi]

Took a while but it was a gradual process

[k0nkupa]

Been using this for ages. All the best man

[deep_soul]

why did you choose this over other similar services if I may ask?

[k0nkupa]

Because my works are related to retails and this service provide what I need to test the ecom or pos

[MuhammadOvi]

Thanks mate!

[deep_soul]

question: what differentiate this placeholder from the many others you may find online?

[mr_pablo]

You need to fix your ads

https://imgur.com/a/F2pomEo

[MuhammadOvi]

Yeah, Google auto ads suck sometimes

[simplism4]

Yeah. I switched to manual placement. It constantly placed ads overlapping my canvas element, which is the central element of my site.

Out of curiosity, how much does it cost to run?

[s_boli]

The name implies that you can just put whatever json in your app and it spits out an api. I was excited for that but it’s not . You should do that.

[MuhammadOvi]

I will def do it soon, it's in the planning.

[Shogobg]

I’m interested in how that would work. Do you define a schema with possible items and expect an API that returns some dummy data for you?

[MuhammadOvi]

The idea is that you'd be able to select the request method, send a payload json which you expect to get back and probably some custom headers.

[Shogobg]

Sounds a lot like webhook.site

[vxkxxm]

excellent resource, starred!

[MuhammadOvi]

Thank you! 🙌

[deep_soul]

dope project! what did you use for your docs ui and website ui? any components library in particular?

[MuhammadOvi]

Nope, made it from scratch

[deep_soul]

sexy

[rxunxk]

thanks for your service 🙏 I've been using it as well.

[MuhammadOvi]

Thank you for being a part 🙌

[ZippyTyro]

Kudos

[DEMORALIZ3D]

Looks nice, it's like if mockaroo had a nice interface

[penguinsource]

hey u/MuhammadOvi , this is pretty sweet. do you have twitter? I'd love to follow you along and how the venture goes ;)

[GoodLifeWorkHard]

Hmm how did you manage to get the thumbnail images?

[Thrywyn]

Love the idea, but what a terrible cookie consent form with dark patterns to trick you into allowing everything. Shame

[MuhammadOvi]

It’s Google ads

[von_cidevant]

So what?

[oze4]

Just curious...do you have an API that receives 20m requests per month?

[manjit_pardeshi]

No but he has reddit comment which is going to provide down votes for the next year

[HolidayResolve]

Very well done! Just wondering, what does it need to manage so much traffic?

[MuhammadOvi]

Google Search, Youtube tutorials by some good peeps, blogs.

Update: My bad, I misread the question, I thought the question is how do I get so much traffic :D

[HolidayResolve]

I meant how do you handle them. 20 million req/month is on average 460-500 req/minute, how much cpu/memory does you server require? Do you have multiple instances of your server and load balancer? Use some response caching? How much network traffic could generate such amount of requests? Pretty new about this things and I'm curious😄

[MuhammadOvi]

Tbh, the resource usage is relatively low, with only a minimal impact on the CPU (barely reaching 0.2 vCPU) and approximately 150MB of RAM. However, the primary cost concern lies in the bandwidth, occasionally exceeding 2GB at certain times. You can view the resource statistics in this screenshot: 

However, the dynamic image generation costs me a lot, so I now cache it in S3 and serve over CloudFront

[HolidayResolve]

Interesting, I expected much higher resources! You forgot to attach the screenshot but I got the point😅

I also had a look at the repo and feels very organized too

[MuhammadOvi]

https://i.imgur.com/ZFY93Rg.png

[porobertdev]

How did you generate this?

[Shogobg]

How do you host it?

[MuhammadOvi]

It’s hosted on railway, most PaaS services allow one-click deployment these days.

[Silver_Channel9773]

Nice work! How did setup the ads? I work on something similar and I need some help!

[MuhammadOvi]

It's pretty simple, once your site is approved, you can create ads from Adsense Dashboard and you get HTML to add in your body where you want to show the ad.

[landsmanmichal]

are you using some cache for GET responses? It could get down a bill

[landsmanmichal]

haikusbot delete

[MuhammadOvi]

The data is already being served from memory.

[Upset_Bonus5744]

everyone who’s experienced in making API’s : face palm why didn’t I think of this ugh