I’m trying to test my program the the C2 order input API, but I can only make five tests before it says I need to pay a listing fee.
So, I thought I would make my system private, i.e. not available to the public, but apparently I have to pay listing fees to do that??
Given that in another post, I read there is no public “test” system for inputting APIs this seems rediculous.
I simply want to test my api code thoroughly. That should be possible without paying any fees!
Hi, Oliver:
I understand your desire to be able to test your API connectivity without paying any sort of fee, and my company has several times considered changing its business model to allow free accounts solely for API testing purposes.
But currently we don’t offer that. I won’t bore you with the various detailed analyses I’ve done regarding this. I’ll just say that there is often a good deal of support required to help developers with integration. In addition, I feel that requesting a small listing fee, which really isn’t a very large amount, not only defrays our costs, but it also helps people self-select: it effectively separates the serious developers from the merely curious.
I’ll also point out that one of the nice features of a “test system” is the ability to reset it multiple times. Then, when you’re done with your testing phase, you can convert it to a “live” system (you’ll need to erase the track record built up during testing, to support the site’s philosophy of public commitment to historical track records).
So, in other words, your listing fee you pay enables not only testing, but can also be used when testing is complete. That is, it won’t be wasted when you are done testing.
I know that there are very reasonable and compelling business arguments that can be made for allowing completely free testing periods, and I promise to continue to evaluate these arguments in the future. Things could change in the future. But for right now, there are no immediate plans to change the policy.
I do hope you’ll continue working on your integration with C2, and that, when you are done testing, you’ll have really great results which we can offer the C2 community.
- Matthew
If you are doing Java development I just posted this project which may help.
http://code.google.com/p/c2entry/
Offering another frustrated api user view … I just found Collective2 yesterday and opened an account today. I’m an engineer/mba. My colleague in this project is an engineer/mba. We’re just random off-in-the-corner-of-the-building engineers. We’re not flush with cash. But we have expertise in signal processing. We’ve spent several months developing and validating a robust algorithm by pulling data down (in a crude fashion) from the internet. The algorithm runs multiple hours every day. But we’re not website / network software developers. So after manually submitting 1 http get in my browser, I implemented a simple http get loop in our algorithm platform. Just to examine the results and see for myself that the various http get commands and parameters work. That my http get logic was correct. Before I even got to the point of benchmarking the Collective2 submit process. Response times. Expected versus actual entry price. More complicated tickets. Etc. Etc. Etc. After 5 trades and it’s already shutdown? I scoffed. And I’m already expected to pay $100 for a platform that I have not observed function correctly; that I have no idea how it responds? We’re engineers. We are trained to not implement systems until we’ve seen them work properly in test. Your concerns are valid. But there are simple solutions to many of your concerns. Give each account 1 single api development system that can never be listed. And can never have its history erased. Or at the very least, have a single system open to the public for at least testing http get responses. I would gently encourage you to actively rethink the api usage / development process from the user end. For now, we’ll implement the Collective2 interface to our algorithm knowing that we have very limited test instances to use for validation.
