@riomigal if you want to treat a 3rd party service as the equivalent of a model using a database, then you should look at using Repository Pattern and Eloquent Resources
The article on medium.com is very interesting. Actually that's similar to what I am doing but I just use the model class instead of a resource and then inject it in the controller constructor. However is there the possibility to connect a model directly to a resource. Instead of using the DB Driver to use the models directly with the JSON API. Or am I complicating things? (Overthinking)
If you are using a repository, then that'd be a replacement for using a model within your controller. Theres little value connecting the repository to the model and then calling it via the model, as you get all the overhead of Model without needing the methods extending it gives you.
If, however, you need to relate the data you are getting from the external API, then it may be prudent to create a task to do daily imports and then stuff these records into a table. Then you can query this data locally using eloquent.