Why do developers choose not to use your product?

Adopting a third-party tool is a big step for a developer. Beyond whether it works, we weigh how long the integration will take and how painful the implementation will be. Get that wrong and we look elsewhere.

Here is a true story about why developers walk away from a product, and what finally won me over.

In 2018, I got to implement a third-party REST API payment gateway into our company's web app. I was eager, because I had complete freedom to pick the provider. Back then you chose a third party by googling. I found about 30 solutions that all promised to solve my problem. I looked at free trials, freemium plans, and paid subscriptions, but price and a friendly-looking design were what really swayed me. Later I realized that was my mistake.

I found a solution that looked good enough. I signed up, logged in, and started integrating. The guide I got was a .doc file, and I followed it step by step. The instructions were sometimes unclear, but with help from senior colleagues I got through them. After hours of work, I hit F5, and there it was: a beautiful payment gateway. Except it didn't work.

The Word document was nine months old, so I figured some product changes hadn't made it in. That mismatch caused failed API calls and invalid data parsing, and it dragged the whole integration down. What I had scoped as a couple of hours took me the entire day.

So I started troubleshooting. Googling, YouTube guides, Reddit. None of it solved my problem, which I was used to by then. I called support, waited in the queue, and reached someone "very eager to help." He had just started there, and with help from his colleagues he eventually got me what I needed. Finally it worked the way it should have. For a while, anyway.

A few months later, our customer wanted more data in the API responses. Back to the support line. The system was too rigid to allow it, and changing that would have been too expensive. We had no choice but to look for another solution, and we found one. It cost more and worked a bit better, though the integration friction was almost the same. We stayed with that provider for a year, until we ran into one of their competitors with a completely different approach to its API product.

This was it. Their API ecosystem had changed fast over a couple of years. The documentation was thorough, with interactive endpoints and request/response examples. They even shipped SDKs in three languages, so I could use my favorite one, JavaScript. The integration took minutes, not hours or days.

A few lines of code did it. The guides and tools were current. The time we saved during implementation, and later in maintenance, changed the game for us. Someone had finally started caring about developers' time and the joy of doing the work. The way good UX makes users happy, good DevEx makes developers happy.

"We don't know what we don't know." That saying fits developer experience well. The biggest step forward is to admit it and start hunting down the friction points and bottlenecks.

These are the patterns that push developers away:

The API ecosystem is shifting. Third-party providers now stand out on the quality of their documentation, because that is the first thing a developer judges when tasked with an integration. Give us everything we need in one place, all the time, so we can do what we are here to do: build the best solutions we can.

Adopting new technology isn't optional if you want a competitive product. I picked a cheap, dated provider that kept tripping over its own rigid system. For individuals, small teams, and especially larger companies, the move is to adopt tools and workflows that kill repetitive work and lift the quality of the output. That is how you beat inefficiency, not only while building, but while maintaining and improving what you've built.

You might also be interested in: