Letterboxd's invite-only API: what it means for your data

Letterboxd is the most popular film logging platform on the web — but its API is invite-only. For most users, the data they've spent years building (diaries, ratings, reviews, lists) lives in a closed ecosystem with limited access and no open programmatic interface.

What the Letterboxd API does (and doesn't) offer

Letterboxd's API is primarily available to select partners and internal use. It's not a public API in the sense that any developer can sign up and start building. If you want to build an app that reads your Letterboxd diary or integrates with your existing tools, you're out of luck unless Letterboxd grants you access — and they rarely do.

What this means for your data

Your diary, ratings, and reviews are accessible to you through the web interface and the iOS/Android apps. But without API access:

• You can't automatically sync your watch history with other services
• You can't build custom recommendation tools using your own data
• Your data stays inside Letterboxd — the only way out is the manual export process

The export workaround

Letterboxd does offer a data export (Settings → Data → Export), which produces a ZIP file containing your diary, ratings, reviews, watchlist, and lists as CSV files. This is a manual process — you need to request the export, download the ZIP, and then decide where to take it.

The export is your data, in a usable format. It's the escape hatch that makes data portability possible even without API access.

Why KinoChain takes a different approach

KinoChain was built with data portability as a first principle. You can import from Letterboxd, Trakt, and IMDb. You can export your full diary at any time. And KinoChain's API will be public — not invite-only — giving developers the ability to build on top of the platform.

Your watch history is your data. You should be able to take it anywhere.

Import your Letterboxd data into KinoChain →