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The first thing we're going to explore is how to authenticate ourselves with an

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API provider so that we can access more secure and more valuable data from the

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API providers. Up to this point, we've learned about API endpoints,

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so figuring out what is the URL that we need to hit up in order to get a

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particular piece of data. We also looked at API parameters,

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so passing in different inputs so that we can get different pieces of data

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back from the API provider.

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Now we're going to take one step further and look at how we can use APIs

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that require authentication. Previously

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all of the APIs that we've used were free APIs.

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They were provided completely free and we can access all parts of it without any

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sort of payment here. Now,

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this is because the data that's contained in those APIs are very simple and

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nobody is going to be using that data to build a very fancy or big commercial

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application. Now, on the other hand, there's 

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other types of data that are very valuable, for example, weather data,

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because it

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makes a lot of energy and time for somebody or some company to collect all of

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this data and provide it for you. In these cases,

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some of these APIs can have a paid tier.

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So you actually have to pay if you're running an application

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or if you have a company that needs to get this data very frequently and you

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need to get large amounts of the data.

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Why do people charge for API anyways? Well, if you think about something simple

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like the weather, it's not actually that simple. How do you even get 

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the weather

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if I asked you to figure out the weather without using some sort of website or tool?

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Well, in this particular case, open weather map,

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they have access to over 4,000 weather stations across the globe,

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and then their data scientists will take that weather data and look at the

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satellite images and process that data in order to figure out the weather and

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predict the weather for each city in the world. As you can imagine,

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that's going to be really resource-intensive and it's going to require a lot of

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employees and also server maintenance and electricity costs, right?

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So for all of that hassle, if they're going to provide this data for you,

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then it's reasonable that you should be paying for it, right?

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Essentially you can see a lot of

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APIs as a way of selling data.

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If you own some sort of privileged piece of data that you are constantly

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updating, or you are actively generating, for example,

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weather data from satellite images or financial data,

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then it's reasonable that you should be charging for this data

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especially if somebody is going to rely on it heavily in order to build a

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commercial app or a company. But luckily,

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most of these APIs provide a free tier that allows you to test out the

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application.

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And if you are somebody who's just learning the ropes then it doesn't make sense

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to charge you.

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It only makes sense when your application or your service has a lot of users.

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And then you start going into the paid tiers. Now,

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how do you prevent people from abusing this free tier?

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Because anybody can say, well, I'm just learning, you know.

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You can be somebody who's running a 1000 employee company

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and you could claim that you're just learning.

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So the way that they prevent people from abusing their service is through

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something known as an API key.

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And this is almost like your personal account number and password.

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This is the way how the API provider can track how much you're using their API

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and to authorize your access and deny you access

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once you've gone over the limit. Now,

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different API providers tend to have different ways that you can authenticate

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yourself with them,

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but most of them involve some sort of an API key.

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In the next lesson, I want to show you how we can implement the open weather

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map API,

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authenticate ourselves with an API key that we generate, and get the live wather

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data. So for all of that and more, I'll see you on the next lesson,