$90 BILLION? Yes. I’ll write that out in long form – $90,000,000,000 – and we think that is a conservative estimate of the amount of effort lost to poor API quality a year.
To get to that number we analyzed almost 10,000 API endpoints across a billion API calls made from 100 different cloud locations. Using our technology, we then looked at the incidence of not just outages, but also periods of poor performance or subpar quality for the APIs.
When we consider “subpar” we’re looking at periods where the overall quality of service we measured using our Cloud API Consistency Score system and our intelligent outlier detections. We have been able to tie this back empirically to customer experience and times when customers might be complaining about external performance while nothing significant shows in internal monitoring or tracking.
The infographic we’re releasing today shows the raw numbers of how cloud and geographic factors impact API performance and shows the cost of living with poor-quality APIs.
The thing that we have seen with customers and come to realize is that many companies see this as a sunk cost of running API programs, but it doesn’t have to be. Improving the quality of your endpoints from an APImetrics score of ~6 to 8+ could save you $10,000s of dollars a year, even using typical offshore headcount costs.
When we looked at it in terms of time rather than estimating costs, we still found that it takes about 2.5x the resources to support poor-quality APIs over good ones.
In these times, can you imagine what having another engineering head available for other issues rather than customer support? We can and we can help any organization get there.
Read the press release and get in touch!