You're not wrong, but apis are normally paid for buissnesses that have banking. The market isn't very large for paid apis for unbanked people

Using LN for this encounters too many technical / logistical problems.

API that stops working because your LN channel is not balanced correctly, and then needing to pay $50 to rebalance channel to earn $.005 per API call is not worth it.

The unbanked may not even be able to afford the channel open / close fees....so....