I enjoy reviewing APIs. I’m good at it. Over 15 years, I’ve developed a rich and proven API discovery and profiling process. Recently, folks at Avalara reached out to me about my API Evangelist Postman Workspace. This happens regularly, as I’ve created many workspaces to seed the Postman Network over the years. Beyond the workspace, they asked for a general review of their approach—something I welcome because I want them profiled for API Evangelist, APIs.io, and now Naftiko. It also gives me an opportunity to think more deeply about what matters for our API presence in this modern era, circa 2025.
I really enjoy profiling APIs like Avalara because they operate a strong game, and I have to go deep to understand what I’d recommend them doing. It also helps me think about the current benchmark for what a public API producer should be doing, from the perspective of both modern and legacy API consumers. Avalara scores extremely high when I profiled their approach across fourteen areas of developer experience. You can see the APIs.json for Avalara, but here’s a summary of what they offer as part of their public API operations:
- Access - Website, Portal, Login, SignUp
- Onboarding - Documentation, Explorer, Tours, Sandbox
- Discovery - Search, Marketplaces
- Integration - OpenAPI, SDKs, MCP Servers, Clients
- Automation - Webhooks, Events, Notifications
- Workspaces - Postman Workspace*, GitHub Organization
- Support - Community, Support, Contact, Questions, Premium
- Communication - Blog, Newsroom, Newsletter, LinkedIn, YouTube
- Alignment - FAQs, Certifications, Webinars, Learning, Guide, White Papers, Events, Training
- Business - Trial, Pricing, Customers, Partners, Use Cases
- Reusability - Integrations, Copilot
- Reliability - Status, SLA, Health Checks
- Legal - Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Compliance
- Changes - Changelog, Versioning
*The Avalara Postman workspace is API Evangelist created. ;-)
The presence for the Avalara API is impressive. They hit most of the experience notes you want to see from an API producer. I’m sure I might have missed one or two things, but I spent a couple of hours going through their website, portal, GitHub, and the web. You just don’t see this level of effort with the majority of APIs. It takes time and resources to get here. I’m sure there are things they struggle with, as well as their consumers, but Avalara does APIs well in my opinion.
- Bring the sandbox out more—it should be front and center in the portal
- Provide more examples and synthetic data as part of the sandbox
- Continue to enrich your OpenAPI usage with Arazzo workflows
- Provide a roadmap for APIs, integrations, and tools
- Add semantics to each of the APIs to drive discovery and automation
- Make the rate limits for APIs more prominent for consumers to use
- Continue expanding your integrations to meet your users where they are
- Invest in integrated development environment (IDE) support (i.e., VSCode)
- Continue expanding client support including Postman, Bruno, and AI copilots
- Invest some time organizing the GitHub organization and all the repos
- Introduce a rich agentic layer using A2A with cards, capabilities, and skills
That’s all I’ve got. Expanding your integrations is where I usually recommend investment once all the fundamentals are in place. Then I move into the IDE, CLI, and client space, though I’m unsure if CLI would be something Avalara users would care about. But more investment in Postman via workspaces and Bruno via GitHub repos is somewhere I highly recommend investing. Invest in another round to modernize your Swagger/OpenAPI game—take all those business workflows you have and make them available as Arazzo workflows. Then layer on a rich derivative layer of Postman and Bruno Collections on top. It won’t take too much work but will help reduce friction in onboarding and contribute to automation.
Another round of investment in Swagger/OpenAPI, along with JSON Schema enriched with semantics like JSON-LD and tagging using OpenAPI 3.2, would set the base you need for more client development and automation. This would continue leveling up your game with the AI context window of your MCP servers, and also allow you to begin laying the right foundation for the A2A cards, capabilities, and skills you’ll need to power your agentic automation game. When done right, this could elevate your game in several of the areas I outlined above—improving access, onboarding, discovery, automation, and even your support, communication, and alignment with consumers. It could open up new business opportunities along the way. You have the API base present, and you’ve begun laying the base for AI with your MCP. Next, you just need to double down on your existing API investment while also leveling up your AI investment.
This profile has pushed me to update an old post I did on API, OpenAPI, Collections, Docs, Explorer, Playground, Client, SDKs, and Integrations—updating the client section and adding IDE and agentic to the mix. Avalara really represents the next evolution in not just portals and developer experience, but also the way OpenAPI and JSON Schema provide a rich base to generate MCP, A2A, Postman, and Bruno Collections to integrate and automate in the ways developers already work.
Avalara was a fun profile. I’ll continue to look at what the next round of investment in Avalara might look like when it comes to OpenAPI and JSON Schema, using Spectral rules to shine a spotlight on what’s needed. Then I’ll play with the ways they’ve deployed MCP and see how I can help translate some of their rich business workflows into more refined MCP context windows, then align and expand with how other API providers are making it easy to register MCP with clients, like Figma is. I’ll also explore how it can all be used to automate with agents using A2A.
