Does Kickstarter have a public API? [closed]

Question

I am looking for a kickstarter API (but had no luck finding one).

I did see a scraping API on github, but that's not really what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

Not really (currently!), but they do have a private way to get projects using their ajax search functionality. Using:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/search.json?search=&term=TERM_HERE

results (TERM_HERE = "asd"):

{     "projects": [         {             "name": "A Seasonal Disguise releases &quot;Waterfowl Of Eastern Canada&quot;",             "id": 68646,             "card_html": "<div class=\"project-card-wrap\">\n<div class=\"project-card\">\n<div class=\"project-thumbnail\">\n<a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1560695581/a-seasonal-disguise-releases-waterfowl-of-eastern?ref=live\" target=\"\"><img alt=\"Photo-little\" class=\"projectphoto-little\" height=\"150\" src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/68646/photo-little.jpg?1326348575\" width=\"200\" /></a>\n</div>\n<h2>\n<strong>\n<a href=\"https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1560695581/a-seasonal-disguise-releases-waterfowl-of-eastern?ref=live\" target=\"\">A Seasonal Disguise releases &quot;Waterfowl Of Eastern Canada&quot;</a>\n</strong>\n<span>\nby\nZ.V. House\n</span>\n</h2>\n<p>After three long years ASD is releasing another full length album and going on tour. They are poor and need your help!</p>\n<ul class=\"project-meta\">\n<li>\n<a href=\"/discover/cities/boise-id?ref=card\" target=\"\"><span class=\"icon-location\"></span>\n<span class=\"location-name\">Boise, ID</span>\n</a></li>\n</ul>\n<div class=\"project-pledged-successful\">\n<strong>Successful!</strong>\n</div>\n<div class=\"project-pledged-wrap\" style=\"display: none;\">\n<div class=\"project-pledged\" style=\"width: 100%\"></div>\n</div>\n<ul class=\"project-stats\">\n<li class=\"first funded\">\n<strong>100%</strong>\nfunded\n</li>\n<li class=\"pledged\">\n<strong>$2,007</strong>\npledged\n</li>\n<li class=\"last successful\">\n<strong>Funded</strong>\n<div class=\"deadline\">\nMar 09, 2012\n</div>\n</li>\n<li class=\"last ksr_page_timer\" data-end_time=\"2012-03-09T09:04:47Z\" style=\"display: none;\">\n<strong>\n<div class=\"num\">&nbsp;</div>\n</strong>\n<div class=\"span text\" data-word=\"left\">&nbsp;</div>\n</li>\n</ul>\n\n</div>\n</div>\n"         }     ],     "categories": [],     "locations": [],     "header": "Projects matching \"asd\"" } 

Presuming you know exactly what project you want details on, you can get basic information but some amount of HTML parsing would still be needed.

Sorry for the lacking answer, but this may be of some use to someone.

---

Small Update

benrugg has listed a few other endpoints over in this comment on github.

Answer 2

Kickstarter does have an API, but it is currently private and undocumented. My guess is that they created it for their own internal use so they could have their website and iPhone app tie into the data in a unified way.

Although the API has not been publicly announced, it has been stable and working for quite a few months. With a valid Kickstarter user account, you can query their API for projects, categories, comments, rewards, etc.

The scraping library you mentioned is a Ruby gem that Mark Olson created and I've contributed to. Although this is clearly not the same as a public/documented API from Kickstarter, it's a good proof of concept that Kickstarter's current private API is usable. Here's a link to that library for the sake of documentation: https://github.com/markolson/kickscraper

Also, here is a wiki page showing our documentation of what the API returns when querying for projects: https://github.com/markolson/kickscraper/wiki/Project

Answer 3

Apparently they have an internal API that can be used from outside too. Of course is not documented and it's not official either, so I guess this could stop working any moment, but I think you might find this interesting:

http://syntaxi.net/2013/03/24/let-s-explore-kickstarter-s-api/