Every API benchmark I've read surveys API providers. Teams are asked to grade the developer experience of the portal they themselves built, and remarkably it's going great. Docs are clear. Onboarding is fast. Adoption is up and to the right.
Nobody asks the other side of the transaction: the developer who got handed someone else's API on a Tuesday and was told to ship by Friday.
That's the gap we're trying to close, and we need about four minutes of your time to do it.
Take the survey → · 10 questions, ~4 min, no login.
What we're actually asking
The spine of the survey is three questions that form a funnel most integration stories quietly die inside:
- How did you first find the documentation? Public portal you found yourself, or a PDF someone emailed you, or a wiki page written by the last person who tried?
- How did you get your credentials? Self-serve in thirty seconds, or a request form, or a human who DM'd you a key, or the answer we suspect is more common than anyone admits, you still don't have direct access and someone else holds the keys.
- From "we're using this API" to your first successful call, how long? Under an hour, or more than a month, or never.
The drop-off between those three is the whole story. Everything else — sandboxes, rate limits you discovered in production, breaking changes you learned about from your error rate, auth that was more complicated than the problem it protected — is texture around it.
There are also a few questions about the parts nobody has good data on yet:
- Have you ever abandoned or replaced a partner API purely because it was too painful to work with? Providers rarely find out this happened. You know exactly when it did.
- How are that partner's credentials handled today? One of the available answers is "the same key has been in use since day one." We expect it to do well.
- Have you wired a partner API to an agent or copilot? And if so, what broke — hardcoded endpoints, no machine-readable description of what the API can even do, or auth that was never designed for a non-human caller?
- Rate the developer experience of the partner API you work with most, 0–10. We'll publish the distribution. We suspect it's lower and flatter than any vendor-run study has ever reported.
Who should answer
If you've integrated against an API you didn't build in the last ninety days, you're exactly who we want. Backend, platform, integration, SRE, solutions engineering, the architect who inherited it, the lead who has to explain the timeline, all of it counts. You don't need to be senior and you don't need to speak for your company. We want the experience, not the org chart.
If you've only ever built APIs and never had to consume one, this one isn't for you. Send it to whoever integrates with you, their answers are the ones you'd learn the most from anyway.
What you get back
The full report, free, when it's published. Aggregate data, anonymised, no company named without permission. You'll be asked for a work email at the end for exactly one reason: that's where we send it.
Top comments (0)