The network indexes 62,513 example payloads from 2,603 providers — concrete request and response objects showing the actual shape of the data an API accepts or returns.
It is the largest artifact collection in the catalog by count, larger than security artifacts, rate limits, plans or rules.
What an example artifact holds
Each entry records a named payload, the provider it belongs to, its top-level keys, a key count, and the value kinds inside it. Stripe publishes examples like Create Checkout Session, Create Customer and Create Payment Intent — the three calls that begin almost every Stripe integration ever written.
The Create Checkout Session example carries 2 top-level fields. That is the entire artifact: this is what the object looks like, here are its keys, here is the shape.
Small, unglamorous, and the thing developers actually copy.
Why a schema is not enough
A JSON Schema tells you a field is a string. An example tells you it is "cus_NffrFeUfNV2Hib" and not "customer_12345".
That difference decides integrations. Schemas describe constraints; examples describe conventions — prefixed identifiers, timestamp formats, nullability in practice rather than in theory, which optional fields are actually always present, and what an empty collection looks like versus a missing one.
Every experienced integrator does the same thing when handed a new API: skip the reference, find a sample payload, and pattern-match from there. 62,513 artifacts is the catalog acknowledging that this is how the work is really done.
The agent case is stronger
For an agent, examples do something schemas cannot: they resolve ambiguity without a round trip.
An agent constructing a request from a schema alone has to guess at conventions and discover its mistakes through 400s. Each failure costs a call, a parse and a retry, and some of those retries are against endpoints where retrying is not free. A worked example collapses that loop — the agent has a template to fill rather than a shape to infer.
This is also why openapi_examples is a scored dimension in agent readiness, with three states rather than two: verified, partial, or absent. Salesforce and Webex score verified. Microsoft Graph and Mastercard score partial. The distinction is whether the examples in the contract actually validate against the schemas they claim to illustrate — because an example that has drifted from its schema is worse than none at all.
The coverage gap
2,603 providers publish examples. The catalog holds 26,530 providers. Roughly one in ten.
That ratio is better than it looks, because examples are usually generated from a specification that already carries them — so the number partly tracks how many providers write examples into their OpenAPI in the first place. The examples keyword has been in the specification since Swagger 2.0. It remains one of the most consistently skipped fields in it.
Takeaway
62,513 example payloads from 2,603 providers — the biggest artifact collection on the network, covering about one provider in ten. Schemas tell a client what is permitted. Examples tell it what is customary, and customary is what integrations actually run on.
Browse the catalog at apis.io.