Tugboat Yards

Tugboat Yards Inc. was a San Francisco startup (product name "Tugboat") that built tools for independent publishers and media creators to raise direct financial support from their audiences, and was backed by a16z. The company is defunct - the product was live circa 2012-2014, the tugboatyards.com domain was reduced to a registrar parking page by 2016, and as of July 2026 the domain publishes no A/AAAA records. It did operate a real, documented publisher API at api.tugboatyards.com (key-check, pages, offers, subscribers, orders, checkout configuration, placements, and Instant Payment Notification webhooks) with a first-party Python client, pytugboat. That surface is offline; the artifacts in this repository are a historical record recovered from the provider's own 2015 documentation via the Wayback Machine and from the still-live pytugboat docs on Read the Docs. This profile is preserved as part of the a16z venture-portfolio graph in the API Evangelist network.

Tugboat Yards publishes 1 API on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Media, Publishing, Crowdfunding, and Audience Funding.

The Tugboat Yards catalog on APIs.io includes 1 event-driven AsyncAPI specification.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Source on GitHub
14.6/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 6/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
AccessSelf serve
1 APIs
CompanyMediaPublishingCrowdfundingAudience FundingPaymentsDefunct

Kin Score

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 14.6/100 · minimal
Contract Quality 5.7 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 20
Commercial Clarity 0.0 / 20
Operational Transparency 0.0 / 13
Governance 0.0 / 12
Discoverability 9.3 / 10
Agent readiness — 6/100 · human only
Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 0 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7
Typed Event Surface 6 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3
Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/tugboat-yards: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Want it done for you? Prioritized profiling — $2,500 →

APIs 1

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Tugboat Yards API (defunct)

Publisher-scoped REST API for the Tugboat audience-funding platform, covering API-key verification, pages, offers and offer issues, subscribers, orders, the deprecated WePay che...

Event Specifications 1

AsyncAPI definitions for this provider's event-driven and streaming APIs.

Tugboat Yards Webhooks

ASYNCAPI

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Tugboat Yards Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Tugboat Yards Domain Security

no transport/DNS hardening detected

SECURITY

Resources

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

LLMsTxt
LLMsTxt

Design & Contract 1

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Lifecycle
Lifecycle

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Packages
Packages

Access & Security 1

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity
DomainSecurity

Source (apis.yml)

apis.yml Raw ↑ 
aid: tugboat-yards
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: self-serve
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Self-serve signup
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - authentication
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/tugboat-yards.png
name: Tugboat Yards
description: Tugboat Yards Inc. was a San Francisco startup (product name "Tugboat") that built tools for independent publishers
  and media creators to raise direct financial support from their audiences, and was backed by a16z. The company is defunct
  - the product was live circa 2012-2014, the tugboatyards.com domain was reduced to a registrar parking page by 2016, and
  as of July 2026 the domain publishes no A/AAAA records. It did operate a real, documented publisher API at api.tugboatyards.com
  (key-check, pages, offers, subscribers, orders, checkout configuration, placements, and Instant Payment Notification webhooks)
  with a first-party Python client, pytugboat. That surface is offline; the artifacts in this repository are a historical
  record recovered from the provider's own 2015 documentation via the Wayback Machine and from the still-live pytugboat docs
  on Read the Docs. This profile is preserved as part of the a16z venture-portfolio graph in the API Evangelist network.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/tugboat-yards/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- a16z
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
x-status: defunct
specificationVersion: '0.20'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-21'
tags:
- Company
- Media
- Publishing
- Crowdfunding
- Audience Funding
- Payments
- Defunct
apis:
- name: Tugboat Yards API (defunct)
  description: Publisher-scoped REST API for the Tugboat audience-funding platform, covering API-key verification, pages,
    offers and offer issues, subscribers, orders, the deprecated WePay checkouts interface, per-key checkout configuration,
    embeddable placements, and Instant Payment Notification webhooks. Authenticated with an X-Tugboat-Auth header key. The
    API is offline; humanURL points to the Wayback Machine capture of the provider's own documentation, and baseURL records
    the historical host, which no longer resolves.
  humanURL: https://web.archive.org/web/20150207025009/https://tugboatyards.com/developer/api
  baseURL: https://api.tugboatyards.com
  x-status: defunct
  tags:
  - Publishing
  - Crowdfunding
  - Payments
  - Webhooks
  properties:
  - name: Documentation (Wayback archive, 2015)
    type: Documentation
    url: https://web.archive.org/web/20150207025009/https://tugboatyards.com/developer/api
  - name: Authentication profile (recovered)
    type: Authentication
    url: authentication/tugboat-yards-authentication.yml
  - name: Webhooks - Instant Payment Notifications (recovered)
    type: Webhooks
    url: asyncapi/tugboat-yards-webhooks.yml
  - name: Error catalog (recovered)
    type: ErrorCatalog
    url: errors/tugboat-yards-problem-types.yml
  - name: API conventions (recovered)
    type: Conventions
    url: conventions/tugboat-yards-conventions.yml
common:
- name: LLMs.txt
  type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/tugboat-yards-llms.txt
- name: Packages - pytugboat Python client (defunct)
  type: Packages
  url: packages/tugboat-yards-packages.yml
- name: Lifecycle (defunct-company record)
  type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/tugboat-yards-lifecycle.yml
- name: Domain Security probe
  type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/tugboat-yards-domain-security.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-21'
  status: enriched
  artifacts_added: 8
  pass: local-v1