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%.