Dependabot, but for the APIs you call
Know before
it breaks.
The APIs you build on change without asking you. SpecWatch watches their OpenAPI specs continuously and tells you — in plain English — the moment a change will break your code. Not a 500 at 2 a.m. A heads-up in minutes.
Stripe · GitHub · OpenAI · Twilio · Slack · Supabase · Cloudflare · Square · Plaid — watched from day one. No credit card.
severity
BREAKING
Creating a payment intent now requires a customer ID. Calls without one will start failing.
The old way
You find out an API changed when your users find out.
The unsubscribe
The vendor has a changelog. It has an RSS feed. You meant to read it. You don't.
The 2 a.m. alert
Your error tracker tells you first — after the 500s reach your users, in production.
The Reddit thread
Three days later you find the forum post explaining what changed and why it broke you.
YC reports that 30% of AWS downtime traced back to unnoticed changes in external APIs and packages. The spec was public the whole time. Nobody was reading it.
The shift
A raw diff tells you what moved.
SpecWatch tells you what it means.
- paths./charges.post.parameters[4]
- required: [amount]
+ required: [amount, customer]
- components.Charge.currency: string
+ components.Charge.currency: enum
// 400 lines like this, per release, per API
Creating a payment intent now requires a customer ID, and currency now only accepts a fixed set of values. Update your checkout calls before the next release rolls out.
The engine
Four steps, fully automated, zero vendor setup.
Watch
We poll the public OpenAPI spec of every API you watch, every 10 minutes, with conditional requests. No vendor cooperation needed.
Diff
Each spec is normalized — refs resolved, volatile noise stripped — then deep-diffed against the last known-good snapshot, semantically.
Classify
Deterministic rules assign severity: a removed endpoint or newly-required parameter is breaking. AI translates each diff into plain English.
Alert
Within minutes, you get an email and Slack message that says what changed, where, and what will break — not a wall of JSON.
Missing an API? Request it — if it publishes an OpenAPI spec, it can be watched. No vendor cooperation required.
The proof
Watched from day one. Every catch is public.
Every change the engine catches lands on the public feed — the same detections paying users get alerted on. Watch it fill up in real time; that is the product working.
Pricing
Less than one hour of downtime.
Start free, upgrade when you want alerts in minutes instead of a weekly digest. Cancel in one click.
- Unlimited APIs
- Within-minutes email alerts
- Slack alerts
- Breaking-change-only filter
Free forever for 3 APIs. Paid plans billed via Polar, cancel anytime.