# Tugboat Yards

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/tugboat-yards/  
**APIs profiled:** 1

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.

## Kin Score — 15.4 / 100 (emerging)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 15.4).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 75.9 |
| Contract Quality | 45.1 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 0.0 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 0.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 0.0 |
| Access Clarity | 0.0 |

Regulatory layer — **Payments**: 9.4 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 20.5 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | yes |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: medium).

## APIs (1)

- **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...

## Security (2)

- **Tugboat Yards Authentication** — apiKey · 1 scheme
- **Tugboat Yards Domain Security** — no transport/DNS hardening detected

## Tags

Company, Media, Publishing, Crowdfunding, Audience Funding, Payments, Defunct

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/tugboat-yards/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.