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API Design Economics: How Bad APIs Cost You $100K Per Year

Poor API design creates integration friction that compounds across every consumer.

By Richard Ewing·

The Integration Tax

Every team integrating with a poorly designed API loses 2-4 hours per developer per week to: documentation confusion, error handling for inconsistent responses, workarounds for missing functionality, and debugging opaque error messages.

Investment: 2-4 weeks improving API design ($10-20K). Savings: 2 hours/week × 20 downstream developers × $125/hr × 52 weeks = $260K/year. ROI: 1,200-2,500%.

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.