Unified.to Builds Six SDKs in One Week — While Saving $450K

Key Takeaways

Unified.to Prioritized the Usability of Their API

Unified.to (opens in a new tab) is building “one API to integrate them all” — enabling developers to rapidly integrate with third-party systems across HR, ATS, CRM, and more, all through a single API. Unified.to knew that in order for their API to succeed, they had to offer high-quality developer experience.

The most surefire way to achieve this is through SDKs. Unified.to’s users simply download the SDK in their favorite programming language and call the relevant method. Dev-friendly features like in-IDE code completion and typesafety are built-in, and the developer doesn’t need to spend any time with low-ROI boilerplate integration code.

Unified.to quickly realized that creating all the SDKs themselves would be prohibitively expensive.

“We didn’t want to build and maintain our own Typescript SDK as that took time away from building our Unified API. We also don’t have expertise in all the programming languages we wanted to offer to our customers. So to launch SDKs for Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc., we’d probably have had to hire 3 new engineers, which would probably have cost $450K.”

Roy Pereira, Unified.to CEO & Co-Founder

They considered open-source tooling but felt that the quality of the output didn’t provide the leading developer experience — and would also still require a lot of work to automatically keep the SDKs up-to-date.

“OpenAPI gen doesn’t work very well — the code often doesn’t look and feel right, and certain aspects of OpenAPI just aren’t handled well. We would probably still have needed to spend a ton of engineer time working around its limitations and quirks, and we decided that the headache wasn’t worth it.”

Roy Pereira, Unified.to CEO & Co-Founder

Speakeasy Creates and Maintains Multiple SDKs For Unified.to

Through Speakeasy, Unified.to was able to offer SDKs in six different languages — in just one week, and without needing to hire additional engineering resources.

“We were up and running with Speakeasy within one week! By ourselves, it would probably have taken ~3-4 months — we would have had to source, interview, hire and onboard new developers, plus time to develop each SDK.”

Roy Pereira, Unified.to CEO & Co-Founder

Due to Speakeasy’s automated SDK maintenance, customers always have access to the latest SDK version as soon as the API changes. This ensures customers always have the latest and greatest, while saving tens of hours of engineer time per month on SDK maintenance.

“We want our SDKs to be up-to-date whenever we update our Unified API, which is often. Without Speakeasy, updating SDKs would be a constant chore for our dev team. It’s a thankless task that would slow down our engineering velocity. Our customers would also have to wait longer for the latest version of our Unified API. With Speakeasy, updates happen automatically.”

Roy Pereira, Unified.to CEO & Co-Founder

Unified.to was also impressed with the responsiveness of the Speakeasy team:

“Speakeasy's support was amazing... Answering questions at any time of the day and quickly resolving any issue we ran into, during initial setup and beyond.”

Roy Pereira, Unified.to CEO & Co-Founder

Unified.to (opens in a new tab) already provides a great Unified API experience to developers. Now, thanks to idiomatic SDKs in six languages from Speakeasy, Unified.to’s API users get an even more intuitive, friction-free integration experience.