APITemplate.io vs Shotstack

APITemplate.io

A public OpenAPI description covers 12 operations, with rate limits, four regional endpoints and a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA published. Each account or team has one unscoped API key, no changelog or deprecation notices were found, the SDK repositories date from September 2023, and two documentation pages name different regional hostnames.

Shotstack

A public OpenAPI definition, Markdown docs, a hosted MCP server with OAuth and a free watermarked sandbox let an agent draft, check and render video with little setup. API keys have no scopes, webhooks are unsigned, no security contact or certification of Shotstack's own was found, and the published Node and Python SDKs date from July 2024.

APITemplate.io

1. Send the key in the X-API-KEY header and pick the regional host first, because requests and output are processed and stored in that region
2. Call GET /v2/list-templates with with_layer_info=1 before POST /v2/create-image, so the name values in overrides match the template's elements
3. Set meta to your own reference on each generation and check GET /v2/list-objects before retrying, since there is no idempotency key
4. Set expiration in minutes (1 to 10080) or export_type=file for sensitive output. By default the download URL does not expire
5. For async=1 you must pass webhook_url. The callback is a GET with the result in the query string, retried three times
6. On HTTP 429 pause and retry on your own schedule. The docs give no Retry-After header or backoff interval

Shotstack

1. Fetch https://shotstack.io/docs/api/api.edit.json and the conventions guide before writing an edit. Track order is reversed, so the first track renders on top
2. Render in stage first. It is free and watermarked, but AI generation there is charged from the production credit balance
3. Call POST /generate/quote before POST /generate, and send an Idempotency-Key header on generation. POST /render has no idempotency key, so do not resubmit blindly
4. Do not store the url from the render status response. It expires after 24 hours. Use the CDN address built from owner and the render id
5. On a 429, wait for the 60-second window to reset and retry with backoff. Limits are per API key, 300 a minute on the Edit API in production