Consider the hidden costs before you decide to create your API developer portal in-house

APIs are seeing a surge in interest. They're becoming commercialized and represent a core part of digital transformation across the enterprise. But whether public, partner, or internal, all APIs need one thing: a solid developer portal.

Think of a developer portal as the front door to your API ecosystem. It serves as a unified entry point for API onboarding, providing reference documentation, developer resources, integration guides, related use cases, and more to help developers get going with their API integrations.

Portals help companies organize and present their API catalog, offering a single view that makes APIs easier to find, understand, and adopt. While it may seem like "just another website," a mature developer portal involves deep engineering work that goes far beyond static HTML and CSS.

Some ambitious teams try to build their own portals in-house, spinning up proof-of-concepts with internal engineering talent. But they often quickly discover the return just isn't worth the long-term investment. The smarter route, for most, is to buy, reducing the total cost of ownership and offloading the operational burden to platforms that are purpose-built for the job.

In the sections below, we'll explore the core benefits of buying versus building, looking at the cost implications of both, and drawing on real-world case studies and industry data to help you make a well-informed decision for your specific needs.

Building an API Developer Portal In-House: The Pros and Cons

First, let's look at the realities of building your own API developer portal. There are a few legitimate upsides for organizations with deep engineering resources. But for most, the downsides (like runaway costs, long timelines, and security pitfalls) far outweigh the benefits.

Ultimate Control ✅

As with any build-vs-buy decision, building in-house gives you complete control — you can tailor the experience down to the pixel. This can make sense for large tech companies that need highly specific experiences for internal users or partners. It's also a natural fit for platform vendors like API gateways or documentation tools, where developer experience is the product. But for the other 99.9% of organizations, reinventing the wheel is typically unnecessary.

Market Differentiation ✅

API usage is booming alongside AI adoption, and standing out matters more than ever. A custom-built portal could help differentiate your product's experience. That said, differentiation is a bit of a moot point here — most portals follow familiar patterns that developers have come to expect: onboarding guides, reference docs, SDKs, and testing tools. While the interface should feel unique, the underlying structure is largely standardized.

Accounting Benefits ✅

In some cases, upfront development costs can be capitalized as a one-time asset, rather than logged as a recurring expense. This can be helpful for certain accounting strategies, offering tax or balance sheet advantages over time.

High Upfront Cost ❌

The biggest drawback? Cost. Custom enterprise software typically runs between $100,000 and $750,000, according to software consultancy Soltech. That upper range isn't unusual for complex areas like API development. Compared to the monthly cost of an enterprise-grade off-the-shelf portal solution, it would take over 10 years to break even at that high end. The math speaks for itself.

Requires Deep Specialization ❌

Developer portals have a surprisingly high skill barrier. When SAS Institute began building theirs, a three-person team quickly ballooned into 15 — drawing in backend engineers, UI and DevOps engineers, security experts, developer managers, tech writers, and more.

Lack of Blueprints ❌

While there are open-source tools to help you get started, like Swagger UI for documentation or Backstage for internal developer portals (IDPs), these tools are nowhere near production-ready out of the box. You'll still need to stand up a content management system (CMS) for content updates, build a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to automate deployments, and have deep frontend expertise around rendering, caching, and managing infrastructure.

Long Development Cycles ❌

Portals can take years to build. For instance, SAS Institute spent a year and a half on theirs and was still working out issues at launch in mid-2024. Worse, most software projects don't ever reach the finish line: studies show that around two-thirds of development projects fail. For agile projects, failure rates are even higher.

Ongoing Maintenance ❌

Then comes the upkeep. You'll need to handle support requests, and the original build team often gets pulled into QA duties to maintain service-level agreements (SLAs). This drains resources and demands a cultural shift to shore up that talent. Without a strong CI/CD pipeline, updates can quickly stall. And without domain expertise in developer portals, it's tough to keep up with evolving expectations around design, standards, AI features, and overall DX quality.

Amplifies API Risks ❌

The outcome of homegrown portals can be risky, especially with API threats on the rise. According to an Akamai survey of 1,200 CIOs, CISOs, and security professionals, 84% of enterprises experienced API security incidents in 2024. API portals often expose sensitive information and handle authentication, making them high-value targets. In the wrong hands, this can pose a serious security risk. It's critical to enforce strong access management policies for portals, but doing so can be challenging without deep cybersecurity expertise already in place.

Tangential to Core Value ❌

For most enterprises, APIs and the developer portals that support them sit alongside the core product rather than being the product. In software, the golden rule applies: focus on what makes you unique, and outsource the rest. "If your focus is speed, you should buy everything that is not the core of your product," Dmitry Graf, an experienced software consultant and manager, shared on LeadDev.

Using an Off-the-shelf API Developer Portal: The Pros and Cons

As you can see, there are a lot of tradeoffs to consider when building your own API developer portal. Now, let's consider the tradeoffs when incorporating off-the-shelf API developer portals, like Apiboost.

Increases Speed ✅

Today, increased time to market is everything. With an off-the-shelf API portal, you instantly have a minimum viable product (MVP) for your API to get into the hands of developers to test in drastically less time. Developer portal specialists like Apiboost partner with Azure Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace, making it a one-click solution for those already using a specific cloud provider.

Boosts Digital Transformation ✅

Most enterprises aren't API-first by nature, but APIs are increasingly important in legacy modernization and modern data strategies. TEKsystems’ 2025 State of Digital Transformation report found that digital transformation was a core goal at 85% of organizations deemed digital leaders. An off-the-shelf portal can instantly amplify larger digital transformation efforts, like making critical data more accessible to internal developers and partners.

Best of Breed Specialization ✅

A storeowner doesn't build their storefront brick by brick — they lease it. The same principle applies to APIs. Most API providers don't construct all the supporting infrastructure themselves. Instead, they partner with third-party platforms and solutions that specialize in getting it to market. A developer portal like Apiboost is built by specialists who understand the engineering nuances, drawing on their experience creating countless enterprise-grade API portfolios, from Allstate to Danfoss, Experian, and many others.

Easier Overall Maintenance ✅

A pre-made developer portal typically has workflows built in to make managing and editing developer resources seamless and secure. For instance, Apiboost ships with a CMS with role-based access control (RBAC), lowering the bar to updating content and ensuring safety for sensitive actions. It also ships with CI/CD features that help reduce drift concerns as underlying APIs evolve or version over time. All in all, this eases maintenance and governance for the portal tremendously, bringing down ongoing operating costs.

Feature Updates And R&D ✅

Offloading the developer portal to specialists brings an added benefit: someone is actively pursuing research and development (R&D) to retain competitiveness in the market. Outsourcing developer portal maintenance brings the added benefit of new feature updates as they roll out. For instance, this could be support for new clouds, the latest developer experience enhancements, cutting-edge AI agent-to-API connections, like Model Context Protocol (MCP), and more.

White Labeled UX ✅

Off-the-shelf doesn't mean every portal is the same — API developer portals like Apiboost allow for complete white-labeling, enabling custom UI designs to match your brand's design style and color palette. This affords the best of both worlds — you can offer a unique environment while instantly supporting a Stripe-like developer experience using ready-made, time-tested components.

Multi-Gateway Support ✅

Today’s API portfolios are often spread across multiple gateways like Azure, Apigee, AWS, and Kong. A developer portal needs to unify these services into a single, seamless catalog. However, building and maintaining those integrations in-house is complex, error-prone, and costly. Off-the-shelf portals ease that burden with built-in support for multiple API management solutions — helping future-proof your portal without the integration overhead.

Less Integration Hassle ✅

And it's not just gateways. Beyond gateways, an enterprise-grade API portal typically needs to plug into CI/CD pipelines, SSO systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, and more. Building and maintaining all these integrations in-house is a major burden. Offloading that complexity to a purpose-built platform can free up internal resources and reduce long-term maintenance overhead.

Lack of Complete Control ❌

As with any off-the-shelf solution, you sacrifice complete autonomy. Specifically, a SaaS-based API portal comes with predefined choices around core features, such as the CI/CD workflow, the single sign-on (SSO) process, the types of API specifications it supports, and the API management solutions it integrates with natively. But if you can stomach some minor nuances on the backend, going with an off-the-shelf solution usually outweighs building all of this on your own.

Recurring Subscription ❌

Many enterprises are experiencing subscription fatigue and are actively looking for ways to trim their budgets. Another SaaS might be a tough sell to the CFO. However, the recurring cost is quickly offset when compared to the high upfront and ongoing costs associated with designing, building, and maintaining a developer portal from scratch. 

The Bottom Line: Avoid The Hidden Costs

People tend to vastly underestimate the scope of crafting an API portal from scratch. A DIY approach can quickly morph into a Frankenstein — slow to build, riddled with performance issues, and a nightmare to maintain. It's rarely worth reinventing the wheel.

If you do choose the homegrown route, expand your budget early on. Factor in not just startup costs but also the broader features you'll need for an enterprise-scale solution — a CMS, identity management (RBAC + SSO), CI/CD automation, and multi-gateway/multi-cloud support — to ensure your portal evolves with your ecosystem.

Put simply, the specialization required is bigger than it seems. Open source tools can help, but they rarely get you all the way there. Without deep expertise and best practices, a homegrown portal can become a costly, time-consuming drain on resources.

In contrast, a SaaS-based API developer portal offers a predictable subscription model, battle-tested components, built-in integrations, and ongoing innovation. It accelerates time to market, reduces operational overhead, and scales as your needs evolve — all while minimizing risk. On the whole, SaaS for developer portals help avoid the hidden costs and is an investment in the future.