Is the API on my plan?
Ask this first and get the answer in writing. A great many products advertise an API that turns out to live two tiers above the plan you are quoting, at three times the price. Discovering this after rollout is how businesses end up exporting CSVs by hand for years.
Ask specifically which endpoints your plan includes. Partial API access — read but not write, or one object but not another — is common and rarely mentioned upfront.
Are there webhooks, or only polling?
Webhooks mean the tool tells you when something changes. Polling means you ask repeatedly and hope the rate limit holds. The difference decides whether your integrations feel instant or run on a fifteen-minute delay.
If webhooks exist, ask which events fire, whether they retry on failure, and whether the payload contains the record or just an ID you then have to fetch.
What are the rate limits, in numbers?
“Generous” is not a number. You need requests per minute and per day, whether the limit is per account or per token, and what happens when you exceed it — a 429 you can back off from is workable, a temporary account block is not.
Sanity-check the number against your actual volume, including the initial data sync, which is usually the largest burst you will ever run.
Get rate limits, API tier and export format in writing before signing. All three become non-negotiable afterwards.
How do I get my data out?
Every tool is temporary. Ask what a full export contains, in what format, whether it includes attachments and historical records, and whether you can run it yourself or have to request it from support.
A product that only exports a flat CSV of current records is one you cannot leave without losing history. That is a real cost, and it belongs in the evaluation.
Who owns the integration when it breaks?
APIs change. Ask about versioning policy and deprecation notice periods — thirty days' notice on a breaking change is a very different operational commitment from twelve months.
Ask, too, whether support will engage on API questions or whether those get routed to documentation. A vendor whose support team cannot discuss their own API is telling you something useful.
The short version
- Which API endpoints are on the plan I am buying, in writing
- Webhooks or polling, and which events fire
- Rate limits as numbers, checked against the initial sync volume
- Full export format, including history and attachments, self-service
- API versioning and deprecation notice period
- Whether sandbox or test credentials are available before purchase
The short version
Ask about the API tier, webhooks, rate limits and export format before signing. Afterwards, all four are the vendor's decision rather than yours.
Related capabilities