Rewiring America Accelerated API Development and Saved Weeks with Zuplo
Rewiring America transformed their popular IRA savings calculator into a robust API, enabling partners to integrate clean energy incentive data into their own platforms while saving weeks of engineering effort.
Accelerated Development
Zuplo enabled Rewiring America to launch their API in a fraction of the time it would have taken to build key infrastructure components in-house.
GitOps Integration
The team leveraged Zuplo's GitHub integration for instant deployments, branch previews, and streamlined development workflows.
Enterprise Readiness
With built-in rate limiting, API key management, and documentation, the API was ready to handle major customer announcements from day one.
About Rewiring America
Rewiring America is the leading electrification nonprofit, focused on electrifying our homes, communities, and businesses. We develop accessible data and tools and build coalitions and partnerships to make going electric easier for households and communities. Rewiring America helps Americans save money, tackle nationwide emissions goals, improve health, and build the next generation of the clean energy workforce.
Visit Rewiring AmericaThe Challenge
Transforming a Calculator into a Scalable API
Rewiring America had built a popular web-based IRA savings calculator that helped consumers understand tax credits and rebates available for clean energy home upgrades through the Inflation Reduction Act.
The calculator gained so much popularity that partners and other organizations wanted to integrate this valuable information into their own websites and applications. Additionally, Rewiring America needed a platform to power future applications built on the same knowledge base.
As the first full-time engineering hire, Tom Carden needed to transform what was initially client-side business logic running in the browser into a robust, scalable API that could be used by both partners and internal teams, while ensuring proper authentication, rate limiting, and documentation.
API Infrastructure
Needed to build API key validation and management from scratch
Security & Rate Limiting
Required protection against abuse and unexpected traffic spikes
Documentation
Needed a way to host and generate documentation from OpenAPI specs
Time Constraints
Limited engineering resources to build infrastructure vs. core functionality
The Solution
All-in-One API Management
Rewiring America discovered Zuplo while evaluating documentation solutions and quickly realized it offered a comprehensive API management platform that addressed all their needs in one package.
Zuplo provided the API key management and validation they needed to track usage and ensure partners accepted their terms and conditions. The built-in rate limiting protected their API from unexpected traffic spikes and potential abuse.
The team particularly valued Zuplo's real-time feedback and GitOps integration, which allowed them to quickly test features and deploy updates with branch previews. The lightweight architecture meant they could focus on building their core API functionality rather than managing infrastructure.
If you draw a ring-3 around all the things that every API company has to do and you look at feature sets like rate limiting and API key management and documentation hosting, I think Zuplo is a sort of one-stop shop for all of that.
Tom Carden, Head of Engineering, Rewiring America
The Results
Measurable Impact
Saved Weeks of Development Time
By leveraging Zuplo instead of building API infrastructure in-house, Rewiring America saved at least two weeks of initial engineering effort, plus ongoing maintenance and optimization time.
Rapid Deployment Workflow
Zuplo's GitOps integration and instant deployment capabilities enabled the team to quickly iterate on their API, testing features and deploying updates without managing complex infrastructure.
Focused Engineering Resources
By eliminating the opportunity cost of building common API infrastructure, Rewiring America could focus their limited engineering resources on solving problems unique to their mission of promoting clean energy adoption.
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