Developing digital solutions can seem expensive, but with the right decisions and a well thought-out strategy, costs can be significantly reduced. In this article, we’ll look at how smart development decisions can help you save money, and practical steps you can take in your own projects.
Why is planning important?
- Avoids unnecessary time and errors
- Ensures that the project meets your exact needs
- Helps to reduce development hours
Planning example: we recently used the gold price API for a client’s website. Rather than paying a high monthly fee (€70-1000/month (depending on the number of visits to the website)), we reduced the cost by limiting it to less than 100 requests per month. This allowed us to use the API for free.
What is an API?
An API (Application Programming Interface) is like a restaurant menu. Imagine that you select a food from the menu and place an order with a waiter. The server interacts with the kitchen, the food is prepared and brought to your table. An API works in the same way in computer systems – it passes requests and responses between the browser, the server and the API provider.
How could we use the gold API more efficiently to keep costs down?
As each new website visit or page change from each different user is usually counted as one API request, the costs can be quite high.
The illustration below shows how information is retrieved between the client and the API provider.

In order to avoid unlimited queries to the API provider, we decided to implement a PHP Cron job so that queries to the API provider could be done from the server. The server will make 1 query every 12h and the received query data will be stored on the server, which can be used later on the website if the client wants to get this data.
The illustration below shows how information is retrieved between the client, the server and the API provider.

What is CRON?
A cron job is a server-side tool that allows tasks to be executed automatically at a fixed interval. It is often used to refresh data, clean files or interact with APIs, for example.
Case in point: integrating the gold price API with a cron job allows data to be updated every 12 hours. This helps to keep the data up-to-date without manual intervention by users and reduces the load on the server, as the data is not pulled from the API continuously, but only at fixed times.