When API Bills Start Piling Up, Building Your Own Middleware Might Make More Sense

Tools like Zapier, Make, and other API-based services make it easy to get something working fast. You plug in a workflow, pass some data around, and you’re live. In the beginning, the cost feels tiny. The trouble shows up later, once usage grows and the bill starts creeping up month after month.

Imagine you’re using an API that charges per call. No big deal at first. Maybe you make 200,000 calls a day. At $0.002 per call, that’s about $400 a day, or $12,000 a month. Then your product takes off and traffic doubles. Now you’re looking at $24,000 a month just in API fees.

Do that for a year and you’ve spent $288,000. And you still don’t own the tech. If the provider bumps prices, slows you down, or has an outage, you’re stuck waiting.

Now look at the alternative: build your own middleware. Let’s say it costs around $180,000 to build a solid setup. After that, you’re spending about $40,000 a year to maintain it, plus maybe $20,000 every few years for upgrades.

When you compare the two, the custom route can actually be cheaper even in year one. And after that, the yearly cost is a fraction of what you’d pay the API vendor. You also get something you can control. You can tune it, scale it, and extend it however you want.

Third-party APIs are great for getting started fast. But once the usage ramps up and the meter starts running, building your own middleware can save you a lot of money and a lot of headaches. Sometimes it really does pay to own the thing you depend on.