📡 Is apiary-mock.com still dead? We check it (and 36 other classic public mock/placeholder APIs) with a plain GET every 30 minutes — see the live status page.

Apiary is gone — here's a free replacement for apiary-mock.com

Apiary was the original design-first API tool: write an API Blueprint (the Markdown-ish .apib format), and you got rendered docs plus a hosted mock server at private-<hash>-<api>.apiary-mock.com that replayed your example responses. It powered a decade of "design the API before you build it" tutorials, and after Oracle bought it in 2017 it kept running quietly — free plans and all.

Oracle retired Apiary on September 9, 2025. As of August 2026 the shutdown is total — but confusingly half-visible, because the marketing homepage is still up:

# the homepage still says "Sign up free with GitHub" (August 2026):
curl -s https://apiary.io/ | grep -o "Sign up free[^<]*"
# → Sign up free with GitHub

# ...but the app itself just bounces you back to that marketing page:
curl -sI https://app.apiary.io/
# → HTTP/2 302   location: https://apiary.io/home

# every mock URL is dead:
curl https://private-anon-8f3c1d-polls.apiary-mock.com/questions
# → 404  "No API found"

# (docs subdomains have flickered back as read-only archives — the docs
# pages load again as of late Aug 2026, but the mocks stay dead)

If your frontend, Postman environment, CI job, or tutorial points at an apiary-mock.com URL, it is broken and it is not coming back. Here's how to get a hosted mock for the same API back in about two minutes — free, no signup — starting from the .apib file you already have.

API Blueprint → hosted mock, two commands

Mockbird imports OpenAPI 3.x and Swagger 2.0 directly. API Blueprint isn't OpenAPI, but the community apib2swagger converter (npm, MIT) turns a .apib into Swagger 2.0 — which we accept as-is:

# 1. convert your blueprint (the classic Polls tutorial API, say)
npx apib2swagger -i polls.apib -o polls-swagger.json

# 2. import it — this answers with a live base URL
curl -X POST "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects/import?name=polls" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' --data-binary @polls-swagger.json

The response contains your baseUrl, an adminKey, and a dashboard link. For the Polls blueprint (the one from Apiary's own tutorial), you get a questions resource with fields inferred from the example bodies (question as text, published_at as an ISO date) and 20 seeded records:

curl "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/questions?limit=2"
# → [{"id":1,"question":"…","published_at":"2026-04-17T21:14:33.603Z"}, …]

curl "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/questions/1"     # single record
curl -X POST "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/m/YOUR_ID/questions" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"question":"Tabs or spaces?"}'
# → created with a real id — and unlike Apiary's replay mock, a GET actually returns it

Honest caveat: nested arrays inside example bodies (the Polls choices array) are skipped by the schema import with a warning — field inference keeps flat fields. If you need the nested example payload byte-for-byte, use a verbatim route (next section). And apib2swagger is a community tool: complex MSON data structures may need a quick manual touch-up after conversion.

Replaying exact example bodies, Apiary-style

Apiary's mock did one thing: replay the example response from your blueprint, verbatim. If that's the behavior you want (nested payloads and all), a custom route reproduces it exactly:

curl -X POST "https://mockbird.mockbird.workers.dev/api/projects/YOUR_ID/routes" \
  -H "x-admin-key: YOUR_ADMIN_KEY" -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"method":"GET","path":"/questions","status":200,
       "contentType":"application/json",
       "body":"[{\"question\":\"Favourite programming language?\",\"published_at\":\"2015-08-05T08:40:51.620Z\",\"choices\":[{\"choice\":\"Swift\",\"votes\":2048}]}]"}'

Custom routes win over generated resource endpoints, so you can mix modes per path: verbatim replay where the exact example matters, live stateful CRUD everywhere else. Routes support :params, wildcards, response templating ({{query.x}}, {{now}}, {{uuid}}…), custom headers, any status, and per-route delay.

What you get that Apiary's mock never had

Stateful writes — POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE actually persist; Apiary only replayed the scripted response.
Query toolkit — pagination, sorting, field filters (?price_gte=100, ?name_like=foo), search, relations (?_expand=/?_embed=), field projection (?select=).
Failure simulation — ?mock_status=503, ?mock_delay=2000, chaos injection (?mock_chaos=0.3), sequenced responses.
Mock auth — real signed JWTs from /auth/login, protected mode for 401 flows.
Exports, so no lock-in — OpenAPI, Postman collection, TypeScript/Zod types, GraphQL, db.json. Apiary users just learned why this matters.
Request inspector — last 50 requests with headers, live in the dashboard.

What Mockbird does not replace

Apiary was three products in one, and we only replace one of them:

The mock server — replaced, above. ✔
Rendered API docs — we're not a docs renderer. Convert to OpenAPI and use Bump.sh, Redoc, or Stoplight for published documentation.
Contract testing (Dredd) — Dredd and Gavel are themselves effectively unmaintained; the ecosystem's answer today is OpenAPI-based tooling (e.g. Schemathesis) rather than a like-for-like swap.

The uncomfortable truth for blueprint fans: the API Blueprint ecosystem largely wound down with Apiary. Converting to OpenAPI once — with apib2swagger, while your .apib files are still in git — is the durable move, whatever mock server you pick.

Comparison

	Apiary mock server	Mockbird
Status	shut down Sep 9, 2025 — all URLs 404	live, free while in beta
Input format	API Blueprint, Swagger 2.0	OpenAPI 3.x / Swagger 2.0, db.json, CSV, Postman collection, HAR (blueprint via apib2swagger)
Mock behavior	replays example responses	stateful CRUD + seeded fake data + verbatim routes
Writes persist	no	yes
Latency / error / chaos simulation	no	yes (`mock_delay`, `mock_status`, `mock_chaos`)
Auth simulation	no	signed JWTs + protected mode
Signup required	yes (GitHub/email)	no (anonymous projects; free signup to keep them)
Free limits	—	10,000 req/project/day

This page is written by the Mockbird maker — bias disclosed. Apiary's shutdown was announced by Oracle for September 9, 2025, and every claim above (zombie homepage, 302 app redirect, 404 mock URLs, the apib2swagger → import round-trip, the verbatim route) was verified by hand in August 2026. Other places a blueprint can go: convert to OpenAPI and self-host Prism (our Prism comparison), or WireMock Cloud (paid tiers). Anonymous Mockbird projects have a per-IP daily creation cap; sign up (free) to keep projects permanently.

Full API reference in the docs. More guides: mock server from OpenAPI · Mocky is gone too · mock any endpoint. Create your API →

⚡ Skip the terminal: this link opens the dashboard import panel — paste your converted swagger JSON (or an OpenAPI spec, db.json, CSV, Postman collection, or HAR) and get a live mock without touching curl. Or create a seeded e-commerce backend in one click.