APIs That Power
Your Digital Products.

A single well-scoped API with defined endpoints, agreed authentication, and a clear data model typically takes 4 to 8 weeks from specification to production launch — 1 to 2 weeks specification, 2 to 4 weeks build and testing, 1 to 2 weeks deployment and documentation. Complex APIs with multiple authentication flows, third-party integrations, or strict performance requirements take longer. We provide a fixed scope and timeline in the discovery phase before build begins.

Design-first means you write the API specification — the complete contract describing every endpoint, parameter, response, and error — before writing any implementation code. The spec is reviewed by consuming teams, signed off by business owners, and frozen before build begins. This approach eliminates the most common cause of API rework: implementation that does not match what consumers expected. APIs built code-first accumulate specification debt — the implementation drifts from what was originally intended and documentation never accurately reflects what was built.

Security design begins in the API specification phase — authentication mechanism, authorisation model, scope design, and threat model are defined before implementation begins. Implementation follows: authentication is enforced at the gateway (not just the service), every input is validated and sanitised, rate limiting is configured to prevent abuse, and audit logging records every authentication event. Before production release, we run OWASP API Security Top 10 checks, authentication bypass tests, and input fuzzing. For regulated industries, we run a full penetration test and produce evidence for compliance requirements.

Yes — documentation is a required deliverable for every API we build, not an optional extra. We produce interactive API documentation using OpenAPI Swagger UI or Redoc, code samples in five or more languages (JavaScript, Python, Java, Go, PHP), an authentication walkthrough, an error code reference with remediation guidance, a Postman or Insomnia collection for rapid testing, and a changelog. Documentation is published to a developer portal and maintained as part of every subsequent release. Developers who can self-serve integrate faster and generate fewer support requests.

Yes — API audit and remediation is a common engagement. We review existing APIs for security vulnerabilities (authentication issues, injection vulnerabilities, excessive data exposure), performance problems (N+1 queries, missing caching, payload size), documentation gaps, versioning debt, and breaking change risk. We produce a prioritised findings report and then remediate the highest-risk issues. Most API audits identify significant security vulnerabilities that the development team was not aware of.

An API gateway is a reverse proxy that sits in front of your APIs and handles cross-cutting concerns — authentication enforcement, rate limiting, routing, caching, request/response transformation, and centralised logging — that would otherwise need to be implemented in every individual API. If you have more than a handful of APIs or any external consumers, a gateway is strongly recommended. It enforces consistent security policies, gives you centralised visibility into API usage and errors, and allows you to add capabilities (rate limiting, caching) without changing application code. We recommend Kong for self-hosted environments and AWS API Gateway or Azure APIM for cloud-native deployments.

Versioning strategy is defined in the API design phase, not retrofitted after the first breaking change. We recommend URL path versioning (/v1/, /v2/) for public APIs because it is explicit and easily routed at the gateway. We recommend header versioning for internal APIs where URL cleanliness is important. We define a deprecation policy — minimum notice period, communication channels, sunset date — and build the tooling to identify consumers of deprecated endpoints before they are decommissioned. Breaking changes require a new major version; additive changes are backward-compatible and do not require versioning.