The API Evangelist Rating System's composite quality score breaks down into six weighted facets: Contract Quality (25%), Developer Ergonomics and Commercial Clarity (20% each), Operational Transparency (13%), Governance (12%), and Discoverability (10%). Contract Quality carries the most weight because specs like OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON Schema underpin everything else generated from them. Ergonomics and commercial clarity cover onboarding and machine-readable business terms. Operational transparency and governance track long-term reliability and linting outcomes, while discoverability, though cheap to game, rewards machine-readable metadata. Seventy-four individual checks feed into these six facets, and every weight is published so the score can be inspected and debated rather than taken as a black-box grade.
Questions this post answers
What weight does contract quality carry in the API Evangelist Rating System's composite score?
Contract quality carries twenty-five percent, the largest share of the six facets. It measures the technical depth of artifacts like OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, and JSON-LD, including whether descriptions, error responses, and types are real rather than just present, because everything else—SDKs, mocks, agents, governance checks—is generated from or checked against that contract. daily.dev surfaces API design and contract quality discussions for teams weighing their own spec standards.
How many individual checks make up the API Evangelist API rating score?
Seventy-four individual checks feed into the six weighted facets (contract quality, developer ergonomics, commercial clarity, operational transparency, governance, and discoverability), each earned from an artifact the provider actually published, adding up to a composite score out of one hundred. Developers evaluating API governance frameworks can track methodology breakdowns like this via daily.dev.
Why is API discoverability weighted lowest in a composite API quality score?
Discoverability gets the smallest weight, ten percent, because although finding and understanding an API from machine-readable metadata (apis.yml completeness, tagging, identity signals) matters a lot, it is also the cheapest facet to max out. Weighting it low prevents a provider from earning a strong score by polishing metadata while shipping a weak underlying API. daily.dev helps API practitioners compare governance and discoverability trade-offs across rating approaches.