Businesses curious about exposing system services and data to the outside world can now test the idea with a free offer from 3scale for managing publicly exposed APIs.

“We’re trying to enable as many people as possible to use APIs,” said 3scale CEO Steven Willmott. “Its not completely altruistic. Hopefully, some will find the API is really useful and they will start using our paid services. But we very much have the realization that not everyone will pay, and that is a good thing.”

The APIcast can host up to 50,000 transactions a day at no cost.

Publicly exposing APIs (application programming interfaces) allows third-party applications and individuals to access services and data from over the network. The practice has been increasingly popular as Internet services such as Twitter expose their data by way of APIs so they can be used by other apps.

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