[thomaslord]

I wonder what the definition of "developer portal" is here exactly... It's definitely possible to make a bad one by requiring an onboarding process to access it and hiding information from the public, but I think there's room for good too. As long as your goal is to make integration work easier and not to gate things behind a registration process, a developer portal has the potential to be a good thing.

A little while ago I worked on an integration where I had to implement API endpoints with specific functionality defined by the integration partner, and I found the test functionality they built into their developer portal very helpful. Rather than having to write tests based on their documentation to verify I was implementing the endpoints correctly, I was able to test against the real code on the other side of the integration.

Honestly for companies that require you to log in before accessing API docs, I imagine the decision is being made by non-developers. I suspect the alternative would be getting a PDF emailed to you after having to ask a real human for it.