Your API Is Ready. Why Are Partners Still Waiting for Access?
Most API onboarding isn't slow because of the API. It's slow because a person has to answer an email. Most teams know this. Few have checked how many emails their last partner needed before they could make one call. T
Most API onboarding isn't slow because of the API.
It's slow because a person has to answer an email.
Most teams know this. Few have checked how many emails their last partner needed before they could make one call.
This post walks through where external developers get stuck, a 10-minute check you can run on your own team, and what good onboarding looks like. No code and no setup, only the process.
What onboarding looks like at most companies
A partner signs a contract. Their developer fills in a form on your website.
The form goes to a shared inbox. Someone forwards it to the API owner, who replies "approved" in Slack. An engineer creates a key in the gateway console and pastes it into an email. The developer asks where the sandbox is. That's a second request.
A week later, the partner makes their first call. Everyone on your side thinks onboarding went fine, because nothing broke.
Nothing broke. It took a week of people passing messages for something that could have taken ten minutes.
You're not alone if this sounds familiar. Postman's 2025 State of the API report found that 93% of teams struggle with API collaboration, and 26% named managing access as one of the blockers.
The 5 places developers get stuck
Every stall in API onboarding happens at a point where the developer can't move forward on their own.
- Finding the right docs: The docs live in a PDF, a wiki and a website, and each says something a little different. The developer doesn't know which one is current.
- Waiting for approval: The request sits in an inbox until the right person sees it. Nobody else knows whether it's been approved.
- Getting a key: An engineer has to stop what they're doing, create a key and send it. Keys end up in email threads, where nobody can track or rotate them.
- Finding somewhere safe to test: There's no sandbox, or getting one needs another request. Some developers give up. Others test against production.
- Knowing who to ask: When something fails, the developer doesn't know whether to email support, the account manager or the engineer who sent the key.
Notice that none of these are about the API itself. The API is ready. The path to it isn't.
A 10-minute check for your own team
You don't need a tool or a report to see how your onboarding is doing. You need your inbox and your gateway console.
Count these four things:
- Emails per key: Find the last partner you onboarded. Count every email and message it took before they got a working key.
- Days to first call: Find the date they signed up, then the date of their first successful call in your gateway logs. Count the days between them.
- Access tickets: Search your help desk for "API key", "access" or "sandbox" over the last 90 days. Count the tickets.
- Keys nobody remembers: Open your gateway console and look at the list of active keys. Count the ones nobody on your team can match to a partner.
The last number tends to matter most. A key nobody can match to a partner is a key nobody will revoke when a contract ends. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 found 23.77 million new secrets, such as keys and tokens, pushed to public GitHub repositories in 2024. Keys that travel by email are harder to track, and harder to revoke when one leaks.
What good onboarding looks like
Good onboarding doesn't remove control. It removes the waiting.
| Step | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Docs | Spread across a PDF, a wiki and a website | One portal, updated when the API changes |
| Sign-up | A form that emails a shared inbox | An account the developer creates on their own |
| Approval | A Slack message, with no record | A rule: sandbox approves itself, production gets reviewed |
| Keys | Pasted into an email by an engineer | Issued in the portal, rotated and revoked from there |
| Testing | A second request for sandbox access | A sandbox ready the moment the account exists |
The goal is simple. A developer should be able to make a first test call within minutes of signing up, without anyone on your team doing anything. Production access can still need a review. That's fine, as long as the review is the only wait.
What to look for in a tool
If you're comparing developer onboarding tools, these six questions sort them fast:
- Self-service sign-up: Can a developer create an account and see your APIs without help?
- Approval rules: Can sandbox access approve itself while production access needs a person?
- Partner team access: Can a partner add and remove their own colleagues, with roles?
- Key lifecycle: Can keys be rotated and revoked from the portal, not only created?
- Sandbox: Is there a safe test environment ready from day one?
- All your gateways: Does it work across every API gateway you run, from one place?
A docs tool will usually answer yes to one or two of these. A gateway's own portal covers a few more, but only for that gateway. API management platforms with a developer portal tend to cover all six. DigitalAPI is one example, built to run self-service onboarding across several gateways.
I wrote a longer guide that goes through each of these with questions to ask vendors: Developer Onboarding Tools for API Programs: What to Look For.
Over to you
Run the 10-minute check. Then come back and share one number.
How many emails did your last partner need before their first API call?
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes — full credit and traffic to the original publisher.