API cost?

amycross·Sep 06, 2020

Posted in:Tech

I'm putting together a project proposal with a university. Can anyone tell me the cost of building an API for a a database to be used by university careers offices? I don't think I should use a number from google searching.

ara206·Sep 06, 2020

The cost of an API is going to vary widely based on the requirements (in my experience). If the API has one or two endpoints with some simple data storage, it will be one cost whereas if the API has many endpoints and has complicated storage/query/data manipulation needs, that's a different cost. It also depends on the area you live in and where the developers live. I'm not sure what your relationship to the project is but it seems like this number should be coming from a quote/time estimate from either your internal devs or the agency you're hiring.

abigray·Sep 08, 2020

It really depends. A simple, quick API isn't hard to set up but there are a number of considerations that will increase the price. For example:1. How many different queries to you need to support? Are you just reading the data or writing it also?2. How sensitive is the data? Does it need to be encrypted? How many layers of security are required to protect the API? 3. What is the required latency? How fast do results have to come back?4. What is the SLA - is this a critical application that needs to be up 99.9% of the time? If so, you'll need to build in some redundancy,5. Is the API going to be exposed to the internet or just on an internal network? If it's exposed publicly, you have to consider DDOS attacks etc.6. How many calls are you expecting to this API? Does it need to support exponential backoffs or throttling to protect the database from being overwhelmed when traffic increases?7. Are the database queries to get the information from the database already written & working?8. Who will be maintaining the API once it's created?

amycross·Sep 08, 2020

Thank you so much, that is very helpful.I really appreciate your expertise. Very Neighborly!