The API your teams design this quarter sets the pace of every release that follows it. Relevant Software gives you a documented API direction your team owns: an API strategy, a target architecture, and a governance model your engineers can build to and your stakeholders can approve.
API strategy consulting decides which capabilities become APIs, who consumes each one, and where a build, buy, or partner route serves you best.
API architecture and design consulting produces the resource models, protocol choices, and service boundaries your engineers build to.
API governance consulting gives you the operating model that keeps every team publishing APIs the same way, with standards, review gates, and ownership that hold as the program grows.
API management platform selection weighs your traffic, security, and budget against the gateway and portal options, so you invest in tooling your teams will run.
API security and compliance assessment reviews authentication, authorization, and data handling against the regulations your industry answers to, from GDPR to HIPAA.
An API audit and current-state review maps what you run today: endpoints, consumers, authentication, and the distance between documented and actual behavior.
Your systems, consumers, and constraints go through a short discovery, and the output is a shared view of what the API program must achieve.
Your capabilities, consumers, and build-or-buy calls land in one strategy document your product and engineering leads approve.
The architecture blueprint, protocol choice, and versioning policy reach your engineers on paper, where changes stay cheap.
Standards, review gates, and ownership arrive in writing, so every team ships APIs the same way as the program grows.
Priorities, dependencies, and milestones line up into a plan your teams can build against from week one.
Every decision, diagram, and standard transfers to your team in a package they can act on without us in the room.
ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA-aligned delivery. Security and compliance review is part of the engagement from the first workshop, so the strategy clears procurement the first time.
Relevant AI Delivery Framework™: up to 50% faster delivery and up to 20% fewer bugs through AI-assisted development, with every recommendation still passing senior review.
96% employee retention. The consultants who write your API strategy are the same people who see the roadmap through.
200+ companies have built and scaled products with Relevant, and the case studies below are the checkable subset.
Open Banking, HL7 FHIR, and PSD2 delivery experience means our team answers the compliance questions in fintech and healthcare from projects already shipped.
A working direction and a prioritized roadmap within two weeks of kickoff, so your delivery planning starts fast.
Pricing follows scope, and you can estimate yours from a few variables: the number of APIs and consumer groups in play, whether governance covers one team or many, the compliance regimes involved, and how much current-state audit the program needs. Relevant reviews these with you on the first call and itemizes each one in the proposal. Most engagements reach a documented strategy and a prioritized roadmap within 14 days, so you see value before the larger delivery decisions.
A quick estimate you can run today: count your live and planned APIs and the teams that own them, and if that list crosses a dozen, governance and platform selection will drive more of the cost than any single design. If you cannot assemble that list yet, our team builds it with you, with nothing to prepare beforehand.
You get a documented API strategy and a target architecture within the first two weeks, and the full governance model and roadmap follow over the weeks after, depending on how many teams and systems the program spans. The pace depends on access: the sooner your architects and product owners join the working sessions, the sooner decisions land.
One check you can run this week: ask whether your teams can name the consumers of each current API and their read and write patterns, and where they can, discovery moves quickly. Where that information is still scattered, our team maps it with you as the first step.
Both models work, and the scope decides which one earns its cost. For a focused strategy, an architecture review, or a platform selection, one or two senior consultants cover it. They work alongside your architects for a few weeks, and you receive the strategy document, the target architecture, and the platform recommendation without taking on a standing cost.
A program-wide governance rollout is different work. Standards have to reach every team that publishes an API, review gates run for months before they become habit, and a platform migration needs someone accountable across all of it. A dedicated team carries that load and stays through the roadmap, so the people who wrote your standards are still on the account when the fifth team adopts them.
Two things decide it in practice. The first is how many teams your decisions have to reach, because one product team absorbs a new standard quickly while five teams need someone driving adoption. The second is who owns the direction inside your company once the engagement ends, since governance holds when a named person carries it internally, and where that person has capacity, a smaller engagement goes further. Most engagements also start small and grow: a strategy and architecture review first, then a team if the governance work that follows justifies it. Where a single architecture question is blocking your roadmap, a short review answers it, and that is all we would recommend buying.
Yes, we can work with what you already run. The engagement starts with an audit that maps your endpoints, consumers, authentication, and the distance between documented and actual behavior, and from there the strategy sequences improvements around the systems that must keep running.
A check you can run this week: ask whoever owns an API today for its documentation and the list of teams that use it, and if either takes more than a day to surface, the gap is knowledge, and knowledge gaps are recoverable without a rewrite. If you would rather not chase that down internally, our team runs the audit and hands you both.
The answer follows your traffic, your security needs, and how many teams will publish APIs. For a handful of internal APIs, a lightweight gateway often covers it. Once external consumers, monetization, or several publishing teams enter the picture, a managed platform earns its cost through governance and observability. Relevant scores the candidate platforms against your requirements and hands you the recommendation with licence costs, migration effort, and the operational load each option puts on your team.
Yes, when the strategy treats each API as a product. The work identifies which capabilities external partners will pay for, the pricing and packaging models that fit your market, and the metering, rate limiting, and governance a paid API needs. You walk away with a shortlist of monetizable APIs, the platform features required to bill for them, and the sequence to launch the first one.
Consulting settles the direction, and that direction becomes the base every later API decision rests on: which capabilities become APIs, how they get designed and governed, which platform runs them, and the order the work happens in.
Worth knowing how much that base matters in practice: our team treats the consulting questions as part of any serious build. When a new API development or integration engagement starts, the opening weeks go into this same material: the consumer map, the contract and versioning policy, and the standards the build follows. Those answers are what let delivery run at full speed afterwards. A dedicated consulting engagement gives that work more room and a wider scope: your whole API portfolio, governance that holds across several teams, and a platform decision with costs attached.
Development and integration answer different needs. An API development engagement builds software you do not have yet: endpoints, authentication, tests, documentation, and a deployed API your consumers can call. An API integration engagement connects the tools you already pay for, so orders, records, and balances move between them without anyone re-typing the data. Where the goal is new functionality, the work is development, and where the goal is getting the systems you own to share data, the work is integration. Mixed cases are common, and the two tracks run side by side under one architecture owner.
If you are not sure which engagement your situation calls for, contact us and we will gladly help you scope it before any commitment.
We hand you that direction, documented and owned by your team.
Tech label
Fintech
Healthcare
