API & integration development
APIs and integrations are deceptively deep: the happy path is easy, but reliability, idempotency, rate limits, retries, and versioning are where production systems live or die. This is backend-craft work, and the bench for it is specific.
What separates a good build from a costly one
Idempotency and retries are the product
Anything moving data between systems must handle duplicates, partial failures, and replays cleanly.
Versioning is forever
Once a third party depends on your API, you cannot casually change it. A team that has run public APIs designs for this.
Observability or it is a black box
Tracing, structured logs, and alerting are how you keep integrations healthy in production.
Common questions
What does API development cost?
API and integration projects typically run $20k to $120k+ depending on the number of systems, reliability requirements, and whether the API is public. Reliability work is the cost, not the endpoints.
Why are integrations risky?
You are at the mercy of other systems' uptime, rate limits, and quirks. The engineering is in handling failure gracefully, which is exactly what experienced backend teams do well.