Six vendors, six invoices, one very tired developer
We counted what it actually cost to add a sixth API to a product last year. The integration was the cheap part.
We spent most of last autumn adding a sixth external API to a product. The code took two days. Everything around it took seven weeks.
Where the seven weeks went
There was a vendor evaluation, because nobody wanted to be the person who picked the one that fell over. There was a procurement form, then a second procurement form after the first was returned for a missing cost centre. There was a security questionnaire with a question about fax retention policy. There was a credit card that belonged to someone on holiday.
By the time the key arrived, the feature it was meant to support had been descoped.
The part that stayed broken
Once it shipped, we had six dashboards. Six invoices arriving on six different days of the month. Six sets of credentials, in three secret stores, two of them in a wiki page nobody was willing to admit existed. When one of the six had an outage, finding out which one meant opening six status pages.
Nobody had designed this. It accumulated, one reasonable decision at a time.
What we are building
One account. One key. One invoice. A catalogue where the latency number is measured rather than claimed, and a free tier you can prototype against without asking anyone for a credit card.
We have four providers signed and a gateway that mostly works. That is not a marketplace yet. It is enough to find out whether anyone else has the same problem, which is what the next few months are for.
If this sounds like your last quarter, we would like to hear about it.