The API gateway decision — whether to build custom routing and middleware infrastructure or to adopt a commercial or open-source gateway product — is one of the more consequential infrastructure choices an API team makes, and it is frequently made at the wrong time with the wrong information.

The wrong time is too early: a team of three engineers building an API with one consumer has different infrastructure requirements than a team of thirty engineers building an API platform with hundreds of consumers. The wrong information is a product comparison done without a realistic understanding of the operational overhead that gateway products introduce regardless of their feature set.