Two Reasons on Why We Ship LiveAPI with An ROI Calculator

For the past few days, I have chronicled my story of building LiveAPI, a highly automated Swagger Alternative, here on dev.to.

I invite you to consider reading my previous posts via these links:

• This API Client Has A Brilliant Landing Page Trick
• Musings Over What Makes LiveAPI Different (from Swagger Et Cetera) - DEV Community
• A Closer Look At API Docs Generated via LiveAPI's AI
• How Scale Changes Everything - The LiveAPI Perspective
• For LiveAPI - Each Day In Itself is a Little Life

Today was a more uneventful day in terms of engineering advances for my team.

We have been trying to close a few loose ends now:

1. Properly differentiating monthly and annual plans in LiveAPI subscription flow
2. Fixing bugs with private LiveAPI runners. With LiveAPI runners, you can run much of the git cloning, language/framework detection, relevant file selection right within your server infrastructure. Only the bare minimumd files needed to generate your docs are sent to LiveAPI backend.
3. Making improvements in status tracking a job. Now you will get detailed logs with valuable information such as files transferred to LiveAPI backend right within the Revisions section of LiveAPI.

While the above 3 are "ongoing" things as of now - which we want to close off soon - a new development got product ionized today on the LiveAPI landing page.

The Idea of ROI Calculation

First, I happen to think that needing a Return on Investment calculation to convince a developer or CTO to buy LiveAPI is too weak of an appeal.

I want to make LiveAPI so obviously great, highly automated, super friendly and useful - that it becomes a no-brainer decision to deploy LiveAPI to improve the circumstances of an engineering organization.

Despite all that, I recognized that it might help to have an ROI page for a few reasons:

1. Toy Models Make Us Think Harder: In the sciences and mathematics - we usually work with ideal or toy models. We sometimes over-simplify or under-simplify, and work vigorously come up with useful models. Especially for a team like us - who are relatively new to the field, it could be a good idea to formally list down what factors go into judging the success of LiveAPI at a subconscious level for most people.
2. An ROI Calculator Could Help With Appealing to Non-Technical Folks in an Org: One can imagine many instances - where someone has to evaluate LiveAPI on a purely numerical and reasoning basis - such as Procurement departments of larg-ish companies. Here, the buyer and the user of the product are different. So to make the utility point obvious to non-technical users, it makes sense to have an ROI calculator.

LiveAPI ROI Calculator - Pass 1

On first visit, the LiveAPI Calculator will look something like this:

Or, like this on a mobile device:

The reader gets 3 levers to play around with - to figure out how the deliverd value changes with various input configurations.

One can define:

1. Repository Count: The most important aspect in LiveAPI is - how many repositories do you plan to connect? We support github, gitlab, self-hosted gitlab, bitbucket and public git repos in LiveAPI as of now - and we are happy to support any other git providers as well.
2. Active User Count: The value of LiveAPI will also depend upon how large of user base you wish to onboard
3. Median Hourly Rate: Essentially - we will demonstrate how many hours of skilled engineer/PM/manager we can save via LiveAPI through some basic calculations

Two Types of Savings

In the calculator, you'll notice that LiveAPI provides you two types of benefits/savings:

1. Setup Efforts: As a Swagger Alternative, we make big effort to reduce the burden of onboarding a new repository into LiveAPI. In LiveAPI the effort required to connect 10 repositories - is maybe 10 clicks (which also can be brought down). Given a heterogenous language/framework/configuration repository - it may take upto a week of an engineer's time to get a really good API documentation pipeline in our competitors. In comparison, LiveAPI integration is almost instant.

1. Ongoing Savings: On a day-to-day basis - we consider how valuable LiveAPI is by estimating how much time we can save per employee per day. For example - an Engineer developing a new feature may interact with our documentation a dozen times a day. And this may save them time of hunting down API in source code, trying to concoct integration code to use the API and so on. Our estimation is that - we can save around 10 minutes for every such effort, and a typical developer makes such an effort multiple times a day. And as the number of people increase, the time/money saved can really add up.

Lessons from the ROI calculator

1. Given a monthly ~20 USD investment in LiveAPI, a typical startup may save around 20k worth of skilled employee time.
2. As the number of connected repositories in an org increase - LiveAPI becomes more valuable to the org.
3. As the number of active users increase - LiveAPI becomes even more valuable to the org.

These are the clear conclusions from the LiveAPI ROI calculator for us. I encourage you to learn about LiveAPI and give it a try with your team. The first 7 days are on us - where you can use all the features in full.