I keep finding out about API breaking changes from production errors, so I'm building a changelog watcher
I build products solo. Every single one of them sits on top of somebody else's API — Stripe for payments, OpenAI and Anthropic for AI features, Meta for ads, print-on-demand APIs, map APIs. My code is maybe half of what actually runs in production. The other half belongs to vendors, and it changes whenever they decide it changes. Twice this year the first notice I got about a breaking change was a production error. Not an email, not a warning. An error, and then me digging through the vendor's changelog trying to figure out what they changed and when. The information was public the whole time. It was sitting in a changelog page I never visit, because nobody visits changelog pages until something is on fire. So I'm building the thing I wanted to exist BreakWatch is simple: you tell it which APIs your product depends on, and it reads their public changelogs for you. It fetches each changelog page once a day Diffs it against yesterday's snapshot Classifies the real changes: breaking (endpoint removed, field deprecated, "migrate by September") vs. informational (new feature, docs clarification — stuff you can ignore) Alerts you only when something looks like it will break an existing integration Keeps everything in a searchable timeline, so six months later "what changed on their side right before this broke" takes ten seconds instead of an afternoon No SDK, no credentials, nothing installed in your codebase. It only reads public pages. What I tested this week I ran it against the real changelogs of the ten APIs I'm watching first: Stripe, Twilio, OpenAI, Anthropic, Shopify, GitHub, Slack, Cloudflare, Google Maps and Plaid. Some honest findings: 10/10 scrape cleanly now, but it took fixes. Stripe's changelog page alone is 3.3 MB. SendGrid's standalone changelog doesn't exist anymore (it merged into Twilio's). PayPal's developer site serves a JavaScript shell with an HTTP 404 to anything that isn't a full browser, so it's out until I add rendering. The thing I was most a