Report by Postman
7th Annual State of the API Report
Key Findings
59% of human developers/applications are designed for humans.
22% of organizations identified new revenue streams as a channel through which revenue comes from APIs.
68% of developers, architects, and executives rely on AI to improve code quality.
20% of developers, architects, and executives use Sentry as their API monitoring tool.
35% of developers, architects, and executives use frameworks for deployment.
43% of fully API-first organizations generate more than 25% of total revenue from APIs.
Postman has seen 7.53 million calls made to AI APIs in the past 12 months.
47% of developers, architects, and executives use AWS API Gateway.
Llama experienced 6.9 times year-over-year growth.
60% of developers still design APIs primarily for humans only.
Just 11% of organizations plan to reduce investment in APIs in the next 12 months.
57% of the organizations are somewhat API-first.
89% of developers use generative AI in their daily work.
25% of the organizations are operating as fully API-first organizations.
69% of developers spend 10 or more hours per week on API-related tasks.
41% of developers, architects, and executives rely on AI to generate API documentation.
33% of developers have ethical, legal, and compliance concerns about AI tools.
26% of organizations that generate API revenue derive less than 10% of their total revenue from APIs.
20% of organizations use two different gateways.
67% of developers, architects, and executives adopt functional testing practices.
Only 26% of developers, architects, and executives use semantic versioning.
11% of organizations that generate API revenue derive more than 75% of their total revenue from APIs.
The percentage of organizations operating as fully API-first increased by 12% from 2024.
70% of developers are aware of the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
24% of developers actively design APIs with AI agents in mind.
Calls made to AI APIs have increased by 40% year-over-year according to Postman.
5% of developers are actively transitioning from human-first to AI-first design for APIs.
OpenAI dominates 56% of total Postman AI traffic.
OpenAI racked up 4.2 million calls over the past 12 months.
Gemini experienced 3.1 times year-over-year growth.
65% of organizations now generate revenue from their APIs.
74% of organizations that generate API revenue generate at least 10% of their total revenue from APIs.
26% of organizations that generate API revenue derive between 10% to 25% of their total revenue from APIs.
54% of organizations identified improved user experience as a channel through which revenue comes from APIs.
42% of organizations identified reduced engineering overhead as a channel through which revenue comes from APIs.
34% of organizations identified improved AI readiness as a channel through which revenue comes from APIs.
26% of developers, architects, and executives use Azure API Gateway.
Only 10% of developers are using MCP regularly.
23% of developers, architects, and executives use other gateway solutions.
11% of organizations use three or more API gateways.
67% of developers, architects, and executives adopt integration testing practices.
57% of developers, architects, and executives conduct performance testing.
23% of organizations that generate API revenue derive between 26% to 50% of their total revenue from APIs.
Only 17% of developers, architects, and executives adopt contract testing.
81% of developers perform testing activities related to APIs.
31% of developers spend less than 10 hours a week on API-related tasks.
43% of developers spend 10 to 20 hours a week on API-related tasks.
26% of developers spend more than 20 hours a week on API-related tasks.
82% of the organizations have adopted some level of an API-first approach.
65% of organizations generate revenue from their API programs.
51% of developers worry about unauthorized or excessive API calls from AI agents, making it their number one security concern.
75% of developers, architects, and executives use CI/CD pipelines.
46% of developers, architects, and executives use cloud deployment.
60% of developers, architects, and executives version their APIs.
13% of developers design APIs equally for humans and AI agents.
7% of developers primarily design APIs for AI agents/machine consumption.
14% of organizations that generate API revenue derive between 51% to 75% of their total revenue from APIs.
35% of teams adopt WebSockets as an API pattern.
Nearly a quarter (25%) of organizations that generate API revenue derive more than half their total revenue from API programs.
49% of developers are concerned about AI systems accessing sensitive data they shouldn't see.
46% of developers worry about AI systems sharing or leaking API credentials.
57% of developers, architects, and executives use Git repositories.
55% of organizations are struggling with inconsistent documentation.
34% of organizations are unable to find existing APIs.
16% of developers have not yet considered AI agents as API consumers.
46% of organizations plan to spend more time and resources on APIs in the next 12 months.
20% of developers, architects, and executives use Elastic as their API monitoring tool.