The invisible cost of complexity: why APIs aren’t as lightweight as they seem 

When flexibility becomes friction

There’s a certain irony here: in trying to build flexible, modular systems, many businesses have ended up with something brittle and fragmented. According to Postman’s 2024 State of the API Report (PDF), the average application now relies on 26–50 APIs. Three out of four organizations describe themselves as API-first, and over 60% of developers say they can now ship an API in under a week. 

But this growing speed comes at a cost. Nearly 40% of developers cite inconsistent documentation as their biggest challenge. Others find themselves digging through source code or asking colleagues just to understand how an API works. Around 33% of organizations now manage multiple API gateways, and 27% don’t use any vaulting tools to protect sensitive API keys and secrets. We’ve moved fast, but governance, consistency, and operational clarity haven’t kept up. 

The operational cost of stacking APIs 

Every new API might feel like a lightweight addition. But over time, they stack up, and so do the complications. Each supplier brings its own data model, authentication method, rate limits, and error responses. Integrating even one API can take months; maintaining dozens becomes a full-time job. Postman’s research shows that API producers in smaller organizations are particularly strained, often lacking the dedicated resources for documentation, versioning, or monitoring. 

And when something breaks, because of a spec change, a deprecation, or an edge case no one anticipated, your teams are the first responders. This results in engineering time shifting away from innovation and toward firefighting. Product velocity drops. Internal support tickets go up. And customer-facing experiences become slower, less reliable, and harder to manage. 

Fragmentation breeds friction 

This kind of technical sprawl mirrors a broader issue seen across industries: fragmentation. In many companies, teams toggle between dozens of tools, systems, and platforms every day. A Harvard Business Review article reported that workers switch windows over 1,200 times a day, losing nearly 9% of their annual working time to context switching. When systems aren’t well-integrated, users become the glue: they need to manually transfer data, double-check entries, and stitch together disconnected workflows. 

Travel agencies know this pain all too well. Booking flows often span multiple systems: flights in one portal, hotels in another, servicing elsewhere. That fragmentation creates friction: for agents, for developers, and for travelers. 

Complexity compounds over time 

The most dangerous thing about complexity is how quietly it accumulates. What begins as an agile, choose-your-own-suppliers approach can slowly turn into a web of dependencies, brittle connections, and support-intensive workflows. Time-to-market stretches as every new partner requires significant engineering lift. Internal training becomes harder. And service reliability declines. 

The issue is especially pronounced for companies taking a direct-to-supplier integration model. In HR tech, for example, there are more than 6,000 payroll and HR systems in the U.S., many with limited or entirely bespoke APIs. As Finch, a provider of unified HR integrations, points out, building and maintaining individual connections to just a fraction of these systems can take months or even years, requiring millions in engineering investment for custom mapping, credentialing, testing, and version control. 

The pattern in travel is similar: every one-to-one integration adds permanent overhead, whether it’s with an airline, hotel aggregator, cruise line, or rail operator. The bulk of costs doesn’t lie in the decision to integrate, it lies in what it takes to maintain that integration over time, across systems, roles, and product updates. Meanwhile, customer expectations continue to rise. 

A need for smarter integration

Postman’s report makes one thing clear: APIs aren’t just technical artifacts, they’re central to how businesses operate, deliver value, and grow. Today, 62% of developers work on APIs tied to revenue, and for 21% of organizations, APIs drive more than 75% of total income. That level of dependence raises the stakes. Every new integration is no longer just a tech project, it’s a long-term operational commitment that affects performance across the board. 

Many organizations are starting to rethink how they integrate. Rather than stitching together dozens of one-to-one connections, they’re shifting toward more unified, scalable models that reduce friction without limiting flexibility. 

This includes: 

• Single access layers that aggregate multiple content sources behind one API. 

• Central orchestration frameworks that streamline routing, monitoring, and governance. 

• Built-in tooling for credential management, error handling, and version control. 

It’s a shift that’s especially relevant in industries like travel, where content sources are proliferating, but agent time and technical capacity are not. Reducing fragmentation and simplifying integration isn’t just a backend win, it’s a commercial enabler. And that’s where the industry is heading. 

What’s next?

Travel agencies, alongside all API-heavy businesses, are facing a pivotal choice. The flexibility of direct connections is powerful, but complexity can’t continue unchecked. 

In Part Two of this series, we’ll explore how smarter platform models are helping agencies reduce overhead, onboard faster, and spend more time selling.