What's the real cost of migrating from REST to GraphQL in a production API?
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"We're evaluating a migration from a REST-based API (50+ endpoints, 3 backend services) to GraphQL. I'm looking for teams who've done this in production — not tutorials. What were the hidden costs? Did query complexity management become a bottleneck? How did you handle versioning and breaking changes for existing clients? Share concrete tradeoffs, not just 'it depends'."
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The hidden cost isn't GraphQL itself — it's running both layers in parallel for 6–18 months. You don't flip a switch. You maintain REST for legacy clients while building GraphQL on top of the same backends. That means: Two auth middleware chains to audit Two sets of integration tests Two layers of caching logic (your REST HTTP cache is now worthless — GraphQL POSTs don't cache at the CDN layer by default) Engineer context-switching cost across both paradigms
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