Tugboat Yards
Tugboat Yards Inc. was a San Francisco startup (product name "Tugboat") that built tools for independent publishers and media creators to raise direct financial support from their audiences, and was backed by a16z. The company is defunct - the product was live circa 2012-2014, the tugboatyards.com domain was reduced to a registrar parking page by 2016, and as of July 2026 the domain publishes no A/AAAA records. It did operate a real, documented publisher API at api.tugboatyards.com (key-check, pages, offers, subscribers, orders, checkout configuration, placements, and Instant Payment Notification webhooks) with a first-party Python client, pytugboat. That surface is offline; the artifacts in this repository are a historical record recovered from the provider's own 2015 documentation via the Wayback Machine and from the still-live pytugboat docs on Read the Docs. This profile is preserved as part of the a16z venture-portfolio graph in the API Evangelist network.
Index entry only — little beyond a description and a link, and nothing machine-readable enough for an agent to act on without a human reading the site first.
API Evangelist profiles Tugboat Yards the way a machine reads it — 4 machine-readable artifacts across 1 API, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Tugboat Yards scores 14.6/100 (minimal), with a separate agent-readiness read of 6/100 (human only). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Tugboat Yards
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Tugboat Yards. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 1
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Tugboat Yards API (defunct)
Publisher-scoped REST API for the Tugboat audience-funding platform, covering API-key verification, pages, offers and offer issues, subscribers, orders, the deprecated WePay che...
Event Specifications 1
Not every API is request/response. AsyncAPI describes the event-driven and streaming side — the webhooks and channels — so the asynchronous half of the interface is documented the same way the synchronous half is.
AsyncAPI definitions for this provider's event-driven and streaming APIs.
Tugboat Yards Webhooks
ASYNCAPISecurity Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Tugboat Yards — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 1
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 1
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
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