Optimizing API Gateway Strategies: Navigating Action-Based Pricing and Endpoint Design

In the evolving landscape of API architecture, choosing the right gateway and designing endpoints that balance performance, clarity, and cost-efficiency can be challenging—especially when pricing models influence decision-making.

Understanding the Context

Imagine you’re evaluating various API gateway providers, and one vendor raises an important concern: they price their services based on “actions,” a term often used interchangeably with “endpoints.” This approach can significantly impact how you architect your APIs, especially if you have numerous distinct actions mapped to your controllers.

Many developers structure their backend APIs with controllers like WidgetsController, containing standard RESTful actions such as CreateWidget, GetWidgets, UpdateWidget, and DeleteWidget. Beyond these, some teams define specialized actions tailored to specific use cases, such as GetWidgetsForFeatureX and GetWidgetsForFeatureY. These are typically created to maintain clarity and separation of concerns, rather than due to redundant logic.

The Vendor’s Perspective

The vendor suggests consolidating multiple related actions into fewer endpoints by introducing parameters or flags. This, they argue, simplifies the API surface and leverages their gateway’s intelligent tooling to manage differing behaviors internally. While this might seem advantageous on the surface, it raises questions about whether this approach genuinely benefits the architecture or simply serves to reduce perceived costs.

Balancing API Clarity and Cost Efficiency

From an architectural standpoint, there are notable considerations:

• Maintainability and Readability: Focused, narrowly scoped endpoints tend to be easier to understand, test, and debug. They clearly define their purpose and expectations, reducing potential confusion.

• Performance Implications: Smaller, dedicated endpoints can simplify request handling and, in many cases, improve performance by avoiding complex internal logic. Conversely, oversized endpoints with branching logic might become bottlenecks or sources of bugs.

• Future Scalability: Introducing more endpoints may seem to increase complexity initially but can support clearer API evolution, especially when new actions entail significantly different processing or response structures.

Pricing Models and Architectural Decisions

When faced with pricing schemes based on the number of actions, it’s tempting to streamline the API to save costs. However, this must be balanced against long-term considerations:

• Does consolidating actions genuinely reduce operational complexity and costs, or does it introduce hidden maintenance challenges?

• Will complex internal logic compromise performance or Developer Experience?

• Could this lead to vendor lock-in if the gateway heavily relies on