What to check before choosing an astrology API

Feature lists look alike. These tests take an afternoon and tell you far more.

1. Test a hard birth

Try a birth in India before 1955, when local time rules were different, and one in London within an hour of a clock change. Compare with software you trust. Many APIs ask you for a numeric offset, which means that this problem is yours.

2. Try the worst case

Send a bad date, an unknown place and an impossible time. Are the errors clear? Do they have codes that your program can read? Were you charged?

3. Check the conventions

Ask which ayanamsha is used and whether you can change it. Ask whether the node is true or mean. A provider that cannot answer has probably not thought about it. Then look for one that publishes a comparison you can rerun.

4. Work out the bill

Take your real mix of calls and multiply by ten. Note what a heavy endpoint costs compared with a light one, and whether failed calls are charged. Our calculator does this for you.

5. Read a real response

Look at the actual JSON for your main endpoint. Are numbers numbers? Are the names consistent? Is there an OpenAPI document? You will work with this every day.

6. Check the languages

If your users read Hindi, Tamil or Bengali, ask which parts of a response are translated. Often only labels are, and the sentences stay in English. Request a real response in each language you need and read it, or ask someone who speaks it. Check that identifiers such as planet and sign codes stay the same in every language, so your code does not break.

7. Ask what happens when it fails

Ask for the uptime record, and what the provider does when it goes down. Check whether a timeout is charged, and whether a retry can charge twice. Ask how much notice you get before a field changes or an endpoint is removed. Read the changelog: a provider that writes one down usually keeps its promises.

We wrote a longer checklist, and our comparison pages show where other APIs do things that we do not.