How Are SDKs and API Documentation Helping API Industries?

The API community seems to have settled upon one ground rule: give the developers what they want, and then some more. Yay for the external developers (the API users), nay for the internal developers (the API developers). 

The exponential growth in APIs and the consequent competition between the API providers warrant the need for maximum developer experience with the least onboarding problems.

Automated SDK and API documentation generations are a sure way to boost API adoption while lifting the strain of repetitive tasks off developers. API provider companies from various industries like communication, fintech, and travel enjoy better team productivity and faster time to market as the time-consuming monotony of maintaining SDKs and API documentation is handled by APIMatic.

Communication APIs: Increased Developer Productivity for MessageMedia

MessageMedia is Australia’s leading global business messaging platform that offers communication services between its customers’ workforce.

Sending over a billion messages per year and servicing thousands of global customers required a streamlined developer experience to integrate their various messaging APIs, and manually updating SDKs on each update was not optimal.

“One of the problems we had with our SDKs was if a new feature was added to the API, we would have to manually make the code changes to the SDKs itself. Given we have 6 SDKs for each of our APIs, it was a long and inefficient process to update.” — Ibrahim Tareq, Developer Evangelist

With APIMatic’s CodeGen Engine, MessageMedia was able to auto-generate SDKs in all of the required languages, and the SDKs could reflect changes in the API on the go, which had been a pain point for the team.

“It has helped reduce the barrier of entry… you can hand out SDKs to your customers and make it easier and simpler for them to code their way to the first ‘hello world’.”

Case Study: MessageMedia Increases Developer Productivity with Autogenerated SDKs

Fintech APIs: Revenue Generator for Fortune 500 Fintech

This leading financial services giant provides access to the world’s largest independent payment network to almost any country in the world through API integrations. 

Hence, this company was quick to realize that in order to obtain partnerships and integrations with third parties, they needed to reach out to a larger developer community and ensure that their APIs were adopted faster. They began offering .NET and Java SDKs for their APIs, which were built in-house, but maintaining them took the time that could instead be spent on expanding their API landscape with the growing demand.

“Writing SDKs for just two languages was a pretty time consuming and expensive process, every time we had a release that affected those services, it would increase our sprints and dev timelines” - Head of Innovation

APIMatic’s CodeGen Engine streamlined their process in the form of automatically generated SDKs and API documentation for six languages instead of two, directly from their API definition files. This resulted in cost savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to building SDKs and docs in-house while reducing their time to market the APIs.

“Fast go-to-market time for documentation, and then the ability to generate SDKs in multiple languages; those were the things that attracted us to APIMatic.”

Case Study: How APIMatic Became a Revenue Generator for a Fortune 500 Fintech

Operation Management APIs: From 1 Week to 18 Seconds with Dude Solutions

Dude Solutions is a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of operations management solutions for education, government, healthcare, and many industries.

They have two front-facing REST APIs that drive their platform and are supported by a set of micro-services that specialize in different areas. 

Dude Solutions realized early on that with SDKs, they would have sharable software that could be used across the entire platform. It would reduce the amount of code in each API stack and understand the security protocols. However, they started by creating the SDKs from scratch and soon enough found out that it was just as long a process as API development.

“We learned that it takes almost as long to do the API implementation as it did the SDK development. In fact, it took one week to develop the SDK for a single language.” - Brian Hyder, Engineering Manager

When they began designing their next micro-service, Dude Solutions started looking for alternate ways for SDK development and came across APIMatic. The autogeneration of SDKs in multiple languages helped drastically cut down SDK development and maintenance costs.

“Development time for SDKs for each language went from 1 week to 18 seconds thanks to APIMatic.”

While they had initially planned to provide SDKs in 3 languages, the significant time and cost reduction enabled them to provide SDKs for 7 languages with APIMatic’s autogenerated SDKs.

Read More: How Dude Solutions Cut Down Time to Release from 1 Week to 18 Seconds

Travel APIs: Client Onboarding Time Reduced by 20% for Didgigo

Didgigo is a digital media platform that assists travel agents in organizing and maintaining data, as well as creating detailed itinerary proposals that save time and boost sales opportunities for clients.

Didgigo offers APIs that allow travel experts to create travel documents for their clients automatically and publish both digital and print versions at the same time. However, for a firm that excels at offering automated tailor-made solutions to its clients, it became critical to find a solution that could shorten the API onboarding time for customers, without the engineering team having to context switch on each release.

“Our process was extremely manual and required a lot of back and forth” - Keanu Ashwell, Development Operations Engineer

With APIMatic’s autogenerated documentation in multiple languages, Didgigo is able to shift its focus on building robust APIs, without having to devote time and resources to maintain the documentation. The customer onboarding process has become more streamlined, with tickets raised during onboarding being reduced by 11-20%, and customer onboarding meetings going down by more than 7 meetings per quarter.

“Our experience with APIMatic and its provisions has been exceptional. We haven't had much time to maintain everything as we're still strapped for resources due to COVID-19, but we've still been able to rely on APIMatic to give our API users an understanding of what functionality we expose via our APIs. The ability to test [the APIs] is also a feature I love and something that drew me to the service when we migrated from our in-house Swagger solution.”

Case Study: How Didgigo Reduces Client Onboarding Time with Autogenerated Documentation

Healthcare/Senior Living APIs: Time to Release Down by 30% for Caremerge

Caremerge is an all-in-one platform that empowers families, residents, and staff of senior citizens by providing tools for modern elder care including family engagement, community engagement, chronic care management, and more.

Caremerge also uses various pre-existing services to make them more accessible for these senior citizens, for example with voice commands. However, managing all these services in a single platform requires multiple internal microservices and a public API.

The Caremerge API powers communication between the services they offer and allows them to build integrations with various third-party vendors and services. Building those integrations requires the documentation for the API to be always updated, so developers spend less time figuring out how to integrate.

Using APIMatic’s autogenerated API documentation with the API playground allows developers to test inputs and outputs within the docs, resulting in quicker integration of the API, and helps Caremerge cut down on time spent on maintenance.

“APIMatic helps us save 20–30% of the time it took us to manage documentation for our API” - Fahad Aziz, Co-Founder, and CTO

Read More: Serving The Senior Living Industry with Caremerge

Quicker synchronization of documentation and SDKs with APIs leads to shorter sprints and faster time to market. With a mission to make API consumption as simple as possible, APIMatic considers it a victory when our customers’ APIs are consumed more readily with our autogenerated SDKs and documentation.