---
title: "Why a Hosted API Gateway Is Better Than Building Your Own"
description: "Learn why using an open source or in-house API gateway may not be the right decision for your company when accounting for cost, security, customization, and maintenance."
canonicalUrl: "https://zuplo.com/learning-center/hosted-api-gateway-advantages"
pageType: "learning-center"
authors: "josh"
tags: "API Gateway, API Best Practices"
image: "https://zuplo.com/og?text=Why%20a%20Hosted%20API%20Gateway%20is%20Always%20Better%20Than%20Building%20Your%20Own"
---
When you’re getting your API up and running, rolling your own API gateway might
seem like a good idea at first — more control, more customization, and maybe
even more cost savings. What’s not to love?

**Lots of things**. Once you dive into the abyss of
[in-house API management](https://zuplo.com/build-vs-buy-api-management-tools),
you’ll find a whole buffet of things not to love.

Building is fun, but maintenance sucks. And the more you build your API, the
more that maintenance will suck in your team and stop the building from
happening. The more you have to think about rate limiting, authorization,
testing, and infrastructure, all the things that will take your team away from
building what your users want.

A hosted API gateway takes away all these burdens and will be better along all
axes for your API, your team, and your users.

## What is a Hosted API Gateway?

A [hosted API gateway](/learning-center/api-gateway-hosting-options) is
essentially an API gateway-as-a-product that a vendor would provide to you as
either a fully-managed service (ie. a SaaS API gateway) where they host the
gateway and you proxy traffic through it, or as a self-hosted service where the
API gateway software is provided to you to deploy to your own infrastructure
(ex. via Kubernetes helmchart). There are several benefits to choosing a hosted
API gateway, like the following.

## Better for Costs

Costs are one of the first reasons API teams don’t want to turn to a
cloud-hosted solution. They’ll see a clear price, know it's going on their
credit card, and think, _“We can save X bucks here by doing it ourselves. How
hard can it be?”_

Famous last words. This is a clear case of a false economy, where the apparent
savings mask the hidden costs, but:

1. **Developers are expensive**. Engineering is a valuable skill, especially at
   the level required to develop, maintain, and manage an API gateway. You’ll
   need individual contributors or teams dedicated to this task. You’ll also
   need to consider the costs of hiring, onboarding, and retaining this talent
   over time. These costs can quickly add up and eclipse any perceived savings
   from building in-house.
2. **You’ll pay for infrastructure either way**. API management tools provide
   some of the infrastructure for managing your API. If you don’t use a platform
   for doing this, you need to build that platform. What is this going to
   entail? Maybe some nice serverless instances. A little bit of an edge
   network. A load balancer here and there. Some reverse proxies, some
   monitoring, some caching. All of it has its own costs (unless you are heading
   around the world setting up your own edge network? I guess then you have to
   factor in flight costs), and all also need managing.
3. **You’re not doing other things**. In proper terminology, there is an
   _opportunity cost_ any time you choose to go it alone instead of seeking
   help. If you have developers maintaining your API, they aren’t building your
   API. If you want them building your API, then you have to hire someone
   dedicated to managing your API, which (back to point one) is going to cost
   you more than paying for a gateway.

A
[hosted API gateway saves money](https://zuplo.com/build-vs-buy-api-management-tools#cost),
meaning your developers can continue to develop, and your infrastructure can
continue to be a simple backend, so you don’t need a whole new ops team.

## Better for Security

APIs get attacked. A lot. The world is littered with stories of
[APIs](https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2024/03/11/what-we-learned-from-these-3-api-security-breaches/)
[that](https://thehackernews.com/2022/11/dropbox-breach-hackers-unauthorizedly.html)
[disclosed](https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/03/business/quest-diagnostics-breach/index.html)
[data](https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/fbi-helping-australian-authorities-investigate-massive-optus-data-breach-reports).
APIs are a significant attack surface for bad actors.
[Salt Security’s State of API Security Report](https://content.salt.security/state-api-report.html)
found that **94%** of respondents had experienced a security issue in their
_production_ APIs.

You're kidding yourself if you think you can ward off these attacks in-house.
You are also kidding your customers into thinking your API is safe. Like
payments, compliance, or preparing Fugu,
[API security](/learning-center/api-security-best-practices) should be
outsourced to professionals. When we say security, we mean:

- **Authentication**. _Who you are_. Verifying your users is the minimum
  requirement for API security. But, it requires significant integration with
  identify providers, understanding standards such as OAuth 2.0 and JWT, and
  managing users and their data throughout their API usage. An API gateway will
  provide out-of-the-box integration with authentication mechanisms like OAuth
  2.0 and JWT, ensuring your API is secure.
- **Authorization**. _What you can do_. This is the next step as users use your
  API more. What exactly are they allowed to do? What can they GET? What can
  they POST? What can they DELETE? You need to control all of this through
  access control mechanisms, such as
  [role-based access control](/learning-center/how-rbac-improves-api-permission-management)
  (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), or resource-based access
  control (ReBAC). Think you can do this yourself? Here’s
  [Google’s fourteen-page research paper](https://research.google/pubs/zanzibar-googles-consistent-global-authorization-system/)
  on their system for you to implement. API gateways should offer comprehensive
  authorization features such as
  [RBAC](/learning-center/how-rbac-improves-api-permission-management), making
  defining and enforcing access policies across your API ecosystem easy.
- **API Key management**. API keys are how you are going to manage access to
  your API most of the time. This means implementing key generation,
  distribution, storage, rotation, and revocation. Each component here then
  becomes its own vector for attack. API gateways provide built-in API key
  management functionality, handling the secure creation, storage, and lifecycle
  management of API keys, alleviating the burden on your development team and
  reducing the risk of key compromise.
- **Rate limiting**. Rate limiting might seem like it is about stopping your
  backend becoming overloaded. Still, its core function is as a crucial security
  measure that prevents abuse and protects your API from being overwhelmed by
  excessive, malicious traffic. By setting limits on the number of requests a
  user or system can make within a given time frame, you can mitigate the risk
  of DDoS attacks and ensure the stability and performance of your API. API
  gateways offer configurable rate-limiting options, allowing you to define and
  enforce usage limits based on various criteria, such as API key, IP address,
  or user account, without implementing and maintaining this functionality
  yourself.

## Better for Customization

This one seems counterintuitive. Surely, building in-house gives you infinite
customization–after all, in-house is the epitome of custom!

To a point. Building in-house will give you an entirely custom solution but
along the wrong axis. You’ll end up with custom solutions to, e.g., OAuth 2.0
integration (just for clarity: _this is bad_), but without access to
customizations that might be helpful for your APIs.

An example: **Brownouts**. Brownouts are a technique used to gracefully degrade
API performance before you fully deprecate a functionality. Instead of letting
the API crash or become unresponsive, specific functionality is temporarily
disabled to prepare users for its imminent decline. Implementing brownouts
requires careful planning, monitoring, and dynamically adjusting API behavior
based on real-time conditions.

Another example: **A/B testing**. You might want to test different API
functionality or performance versions to determine which one provides the best
user experience or achieves specific business goals. A/B testing involves
routing a portion of your API traffic to a variant version of your API while the
remaining traffic is sent to the original version.

These are just two examples of the customization options available with API
gateways. The key advantage is that these customizations are built on top of the
platform's robust, secure, and scalable foundation. This means you can focus on
tailoring your API to your specific needs and user requirements rather than
reinventing the wheel for basic functionality.

API gateways often offer a wide range of pre-built policies, templates, and
integrations that can be easily customized and extended to fit your unique use
case (here's a list of the
[most important API gateway features](/learning-center/top-api-gateway-features)
to get you familiar). This allows you to leverage best practices while still
having the flexibility to adapt your API to your business goals.

## Focus on Innovation, Not on Maintenance

A [cloud-hosted API gateway](https://zuplo.com/?utm_source=blog) is the way to
go when managing your APIs. By outsourcing the heavy lifting of infrastructure,
security, and customization to the experts, you can free up your team to focus
on what matters: building and innovating on your APIs.

When you add it all up, the benefits of
[cloud-hosted API management solutions](https://zuplo.com/features/multi-cloud)
are clear:

- **Peace of mind:** With a team of experts handling the nitty-gritty details of
  reliability, scalability, and security, you know your API is in good hands.
- **Efficiency:** Outsourcing infrastructure management allows your developers
  to focus on what they do best: building great software.
- **Strategic advantages:** With the flexibility to scale on-demand and access
  to customizations and features, you can stay ahead of the curve and adapt
  quickly as your API grows.

So, don't let your developers waste their time playing catch-up with
infrastructure and security. Let them do what they do best: build amazing APIs
that will delight your users and drive your business forward.