A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "The Kin Score Is Getting A Third Dimension: The Market," Kin Lane, October 12, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/12/the-kin-score-is-getting-a-third-dimension-the-market/
Sam managed partnerships for a mid-sized SaaS company, which mostly meant managing the integrations page: a grid of two hundred logos that marketing loved and nobody had audited in two years.
The post was about a new layer in a rating system, one that looks at a provider in its market rather than at itself. It laid out a chain: operation, tag, business capability, workflow, integration, market. And it said something about integrations Sam had felt but never seen written down: "every integration between two providers is a vote." The market saying a workflow matters enough that someone built it.
Then the rule that made Sam put the coffee down. "Breadth is not credit." A provider listing three hundred logos earns nothing for the list. Depth is what gets scored: is there real evidence, does a valid workflow actually implement it, does it cross business capabilities. A short list can be the stronger one.
Sam thought about the grid. Maybe thirty of those logos had a real integration behind them. Some were a Zapier template. A few were partners who had since gone out of business.
The next rule was the uncomfortable one. If a provider does not articulate its integrations, they get reported as "undeclared," not inferred. That is the provider's problem, the post said, and the published rating is the incentive to fix it. And when a workflow cannot be built, they record whose gap it is, and their own gaps never count against a provider.
Sam opened a spreadsheet and started a new column next to each logo: evidence. Link to docs, link to a contract, or nothing. By lunch the honest list was thirty-four rows long. It looked smaller. Sam was starting to think it was worth more.