Frequently Asked Questions

1. How hard it could be to build a real-time job database?

Building a comprehensive job database is a significant undertaking. It's not just about the initial setup; ongoing maintenance, data accuracy, server costs, and manpower are critical aspects. Like any substantial investment, the costs to maintain and update the database often exceed the initial setup costs, considering the need for regular updates, server maintenance, and potential scaling.

When considering building your job database, take into account:

  • The vast and ever-growing number of job listings online requires a robust infrastructure to ensure the data is current and comprehensive.
  • Job listings are dynamic, with new postings appearing and old ones expiring constantly. Your system must be equipped to handle this turnover efficiently.
  • To provide a relevant search experience, your database should include advanced search capabilities, demanding a sophisticated backend infrastructure.
  • Ensuring data quality is paramount. This includes filtering out spam or fraudulent listings to maintain the integrity of your database.
  • High availability and reliability are crucial for a job database, necessitating continuous monitoring and maintenance to prevent downtime.
  • Consider the costs of in-house development and maintenance against the potential benefits of using third-party services or APIs that can provide job listings.

Ultimately, the greatest investment in building your job database is the opportunity cost. Time and resources allocated here could be spent on other areas of your project or business.

Utilizing a specialized job search API can accelerate your project's development, allowing you to focus on your application's unique features while relying on a constantly updated and maintained job database.

2. Are you actively supporting the API? Do you expect to continue to do so?

Yes and yes.

We've been around since 2017 and we plan on being around for a long time.

3. Do you provide any support?

Yes. Just email hello@apijobs.dev for any API-related questions. However, we have to prioritize serving PRO/ENTERPRISE users.

4. We'll use tons of API requests. Are you able to support our scale?

Right now, there are companies doing tens of millions of requests/month with apijobs API. We can easily support at least 10x of current traffic without adding more servers.

We apply best practices of infrastructure operations, with great monitoring & alerting in place. If there is something wrong with the API infrastructure, we are able to troubleshoot and fix as soon as possible.

5. How do you make sure your job database is up-to-date?

To find new jobs, we use three approaches:

  • First, we run crawlers 24/7 to find publicly accessible jobs on the Internet, which is similar to how Google or other search engines find new websites.
  • Second, job boards submit new jobs / feeds to apijobs on their own -- we get hundreds of new submissions from job boards every day.
  • Third, if we (apijobs employees) see any missing job position feed, we manually add them to our database.

6. Do we have to display apijobs logo in our app even if we were to use the paid plan?

Yes. Our API Terms of Use is for all FREE/PRO API users. You only need to display "Powered by apijobs" on one screen that uses our data. You don't need to do it for every screen. You are allowed to place our logo below the fold, so it won't be too intrusive to your users.

We don't make any exception for any FREE/PRO API users, no matter if you are an individual developer or a public company. Those one-off customizations would increase the operational complexity on our end, which would take away our time that could've been used to improve the core products.

Displaying attribution is a common policy for data APIs. For example, as with Google Places & Maps APIs. Uber uses Google Maps in their app. There is a big Google logo in the Uber app.

If you subscribe to the ENTERPRISE plan, we can be flexible on the logo requirement.

7. Does apijobs have rate limits (e.g., N requests per second)?

Yes. We set reasonable rate limits for our API endpoints. If you use our API correctly, you may not even know the rate limit exists.

Every serious REST API in the world must set a rate limit - Google "api rate limit". If an API doesn't have rate limits, it would be easily DDoS-ed. For example, a programmer may send tons of API requests in a short amount of time from a tight loop (or even worse, an infinite loop). From our experience of running apijobs since 2017, this happens more often then we expected. Programmers are human beings. And human beings make mistakes. We don't want a bad user to bring down our whole system and affect other API users.

For apijobs, the FREE plan has a low rate limit, the PRO plan has a higher rate limit, and the ENTERPRISE plan has the highest rate limit. Different endpoints have different rate limits, because some endpoints are more compute intensive than others. A new API user gets relatively low rate limits, which will be increased over time.