Access Clarity
What it costs, what you are permitted to do, and how you get in — plans, pricing, sign-up, terms of service, privacy, finops mapping, compliance/trust. Renamed in 0.12 from "Commercial Clarity". For a free statutory interface, a public-interest open-data API, or a provider whose own OpenAPI states "No authentication, no registration, no rate limit, no quota", there is no commercial surface to measure and only the permission and access questions apply. The word described a subset of the catalog and was read as a deficiency by the rest.
How it is scored
9 checks worth 38 points, grouped by the artifact each one reads. A facet's sub-score is its awarded points normalized against the points that were actually applicable to that provider — a check needing an artifact the provider does not publish at all is N/A, and leaves both sides of the fraction.
commercial| Check | Rule | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Plans publishedAccess plans exist as structured, machine-readable data rather than a pricing page a human has to interpret. The heaviest award in this facet. | plans[0].plan_count >= 1 | 8 |
| Multiple plansThree or more plans, describing a real tiering model — typically a free or trial tier through to production volume. | plans[0].plan_count >= 3 | 4 |
| Pricing publishedPricing is public. "Contact us" is an answer, but it is not this one. | common[].type includes "Pricing" | 4 |
| Self-service sign-upA developer can get credentials themselves. Self-service sign-up is the line between an API you can try this afternoon and one you can try next quarter. | common[].type includes "SignUp" or "Login" | 5 |
| Terms of servicePublished terms — what a consumer is actually agreeing to when they call the API. | common[].type includes "TermsOfService" (alias-aware) | 4 |
| Privacy policyA published privacy policy covering what happens to data passing through the API. | common[].type includes "PrivacyPolicy" (alias-aware) | 4 |
| FinOps mappingCost is mapped to usage in a machine-readable way, so consumption can be modelled and attributed rather than discovered on an invoice. | len(finops) >= 1 | 3 |
| Compliance publishedCertifications and compliance posture are stated in public — SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, GDPR — where a reviewer can find them without asking. | common[].type includes "Compliance" | 3 |
| Trust centerA trust center consolidating security, compliance, and privacy posture into one place built for the person evaluating whether to depend on you. | common[].type includes "TrustCenter" or "Trust" | 3 |
How the catalog distributes on it
Every one of the 27,504 providers this facet is scored on, bucketed by sub-score.
Top providers
The top 500 of 18,767 providers scoring above zero on this facet, ranked by facet sub-score, ties broken by composite.
The other 7 facets
github.com/api-evangelist/<provider>, and each check above names the exact artifact it
reads. Publish the artifact, open a pull request, and the next scoring run picks it up — no gatekeeping
and no fee. The full rubric is at apis.io/rating/, and
prioritized profiling
is the fast lane if you would rather have it done for you.
Scored on rubric v0.17.2 across 27,504 providers · lists rebuilt 2026-09-01 · capped at the top 500 per page.