Why We Stopped Versioning Our APIs

After three years of semantic versioning hell, our team made a radical bet on backward compatibility — and shipped faster than ever.

I spent two weeks last January rewriting our versioning middleware. Every breaking change meant a new prefix, a new set of docs, and another round of client complaints. Something had to give — and it wasn't going to be another major version bump.

The Versioning Treadmill

Most API teams treat versioning as a safety net. In practice, it becomes a crutch — an excuse to break things and call it progress. When we audited 140 endpoints, most so-called breaking changes were actually additive.

{
  "endpoint": "/api/v2/users",
  "breaking_changes": 0,
  "additive_fields": 4,
  "compatibility": "backward"
}