How Undisciplined API Architecture Leads to Ballooning Costs

Part 2 of the Series: IT Leader’s Required Reading – Breaking Down Gartner’s Take on MuleSoft

It’s not the APIs. It’s how you orchestrate them

Gartner’s latest report on MuleSoft reveals a hard truth: many implementations spiral out of control because teams blindly apply the full three-tier architecture to every project—regardless of fit. The result? Soaring costs, brittle systems, and painfully slow delivery.

In this post, we’ll unpack how undisciplined architecture leads to over-engineering—and how Workato’s orchestration-first approach avoids these pitfalls by prioritizing flexible architecture aligned to outcomes, not architectural purity for its own sake.

When API Discipline Breaks Down

MuleSoft’s three-tiered API-led approach—experience, process, and system APIs—has appeal in theory. It’s clean, structured, and promises reusability. But according to Gartner, that’s exactly where things go wrong:

In practice, many teams apply the full model to every project—regardless of whether it’s needed. This leads to what Gartner calls “over-decomposition of processes in the process API layer, which leads to significant performance and cost issues”

The Real Cost of API Sprawl

Here’s what happens when teams follow the architecture without question:

• More APIs = More Spend: “The number of APIs you build with MuleSoft’s platform directly affects costs. Ensure each experience, process or system API is absolutely necessary because it consumes compute resources or flows and incurs costs”
• When Every Step Becomes an API, Performance Suffers: MuleSoft’s model encourages breaking every workflow into discrete APIs—but APIs were never designed to handle multi-step processes end-to-end. They’re best for point-to-point connectivity. As you chain them together to build complex flows, performance degrades, complexity grows, and maintainability suffers.
  • Gartner advises that “limit[ing] the chaining of process APIs” is critical, because excessive orchestration increases complexity and cost while degrading performance
• Architecture that Bloats and Balloons Costs: “Organizations… struggle to achieve the expected outcomes, making it difficult to justify the high costs that the platform adoption incurs over time”

All of this translates to longer delivery times, harder maintenance, and degrading ROI.

Workato’s Orchestration-First Alternative

Unlike MuleSoft’s rigid three-tier model, Workato is built from the ground up to support orchestration-first design—giving teams the flexibility to automate across systems without overengineering.

Rather than forcing every interaction through layered APIs, Workato lets teams use the right tool for the job: event triggers, reusable process functions, or APIs when they make sense. The result is an architecture that stays lean, responsive, and scalable—even as your needs evolve.

Workato also separates how integrations are built from how they’re run. This decoupled runtime means product updates don’t break your automations—reducing maintenance and letting your team focus on delivering value, not patching code.

Workato Advantage	Outcome
Orchestration-First	Recipes and process functions avoid overbuilding APIs and reduce development overhead.
Event-Driven & Async	Supports both real-time and asynchronous processing: Not everything needs to be a real-time API.
Faster Delivery	ERP migrations 40% faster and projects delivered 2x-5x faster
Lower Maintenance	<10% for Workato vs. 40–60% for legacy platforms.

Workato’s modular recipes and reusable process functions keep architecture lean, adaptable, and focused on delivering business outcomes—not maintaining layers of abstraction.

Real-World Proof: Logitech: Orchestration at Global Scale

Logitech’s business spans hundreds of countries, thousands of SKUs, and $4.3 billion in revenue – so when they reimagined their IT operations, they knew traditional integration wouldn’t cut it. They turned to Workato to transform their architecture from fragmented APIs to unified orchestration.

The impact:

• 50% Better Agent Utilization: Live agent interactions were reduced by 50%. Convert +50% of web-based volume is through chat
•  3X Higher Productivity: Logitech went live in 9 weeks vs the expected timeline of 6 months. Also, they can now schedule jobs faster and run jobs more frequently

The result was a complete shift from API-centric thinking to automation-first delivery:

Architecture Should Be a Launchpad—Not a Limitation

The problem isn’t APIs. It’s the belief that APIs alone are enough.

Gartner’s warning about API overuse is just the surface. What we see in the field is deeper: rigid API-led architectures may look elegant at first, but they struggle to keep up with the messy, ever-changing realities of enterprise operations. Over time, they slow teams down, inflate costs, and introduce brittleness into systems that should be built for adaptability.

That’s why Workato takes a different approach.

We believe APIs are just one ingredient in the orchestration journey—not the recipe. Workato’s platform gives teams a much broader, more powerful toolkit: modular recipes, event-driven triggers, human-in-the-loop experiences, real-time and async processing, and native AI capabilities. This flexibility doesn’t just avoid the pitfalls of over-engineering—it creates a foundation that’s anti-fragile, scalable, and built to evolve as your business grows.

Three things to remember:

• Rigid API-first architectures break down over time. What starts clean and composable often becomes bloated, brittle, and expensive to maintain.
• You don’t need three layers for every integration. Workato avoids unnecessary complexity by focusing on outcomes, not abstractions.
• Workato scales with you. It is automation-centric, has decoupled runtime and designed to adapt—so you can go faster today and flex tomorrow.

Workato isn’t just an alternative to API-led integration. It’s the future of enterprise orchestration.

📘 Further Reading

• Download: How to Maximize Value from MuleSoft Deployments
• Endless Maintenance Is Not an IT Strategy: Why Decoupled Architecture Outpaces Legacy iPaaS
• Enterprise Orchestration Platform: The Future of AI and iPaaS

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Explore the Full Series:

IT Leader’s Required Reading – Breaking Down Gartner’s Take on MuleSoft

• Part 1: Rethinking MuleSoft’s API-Led Model: Costly Overhead or Strategic Advantage? – Why MuleSoft’s API-led model isn’t right for every integration
• Part 2: Architecture Without Restraint: How Undisciplined API Architecture Leads to Ballooning Costs – Why undisciplined use of architecture leads to high costs for the organization
• Part 3: Why MuleSoft’s Reuse-First Model Rarely Pays Off – Why chasing reuse is often a distraction from real outcomes
• Part 4: The Skills Gap No One Talks About – How talent shortages quietly derail projects