Reducing API response time from 1.4s to 18ms for a B2B SaaS platform
The Situation
A B2B workflow automation platform serving 200+ enterprise clients was seeing API timeouts during business hours. Their monolithic API was handling authentication, business logic, and database queries in a single synchronous chain every request waited on everything else.
What We Did
We introduced a layered Clean Architecture refactor, separated read/write paths using CQRS, and implemented response caching at the API gateway layer. Heavy computation was offloaded to a background queue.
The Outcome
Average response time dropped from 1.4s to 18ms. Server costs decreased 40% due to fewer resources needed per request. Zero client-reported timeouts in the 6 months following the engagement.
78x
Faster response time
-40%
Infrastructure cost
0
Timeouts since go-live