API Overdrive Sidecar for ERPs

Integration & Automation
🔥
9/10
Demand Score
Critical projects stall due to missing endpoints or vendor ticket backlogs; teams need a safe way to proceed without waiting months for API changes.
🌊
8/10
Blue Ocean
Competition Level
💰
$2k-10k
Price/Month
Predicted customer spend
⏱️
90 days
Time to MVP
Difficulty: Expert

The Problem

A deployable sidecar that wraps limited ERP APIs with a resilient virtual API. It smooths rate limits, adds durable write queues with transactional reconciliation, and synthesizes missing endpoints vi

🔗 Validated by Real User Complaints

This problem has been verified through 5 real user complaints:

Competitor Landscape

  • Apigee/Kong/Tyk (generic gateways)
  • Gravitee
  • Celigo/Workato (iPaaS, not API augmentation)
  • UiPath/Automation Anywhere (RPA, not domain virtual API)

Must-Have Features for MVP

Virtual API layer with capability negotiation and versioning
Durable write queue with exactly-once reconciliation
Rate-limit smoothing and backoff policies
Fallback adapters: UI automation, file-drop, email, read-only DB
Sandbox verifier and audit logging
Circuit breakers and global kill-switch
SDKs for JS/Java/.NET with typed models

⚠️ Potential Challenges

  • ERP EULAs or governance may restrict UI automation
  • Screen changes can break RPA flows
  • Security review for DB or file-drop access
  • Change management to adopt a virtualized API

Risk Level: High

🎯 Keys to Success

  • >99% success rate on virtualized endpoints during vendor outages
  • 50% reduction in integration lead times caused by API gaps
  • Zero data divergence post-commit as verified by reconciler
  • Defined SLOs achieved for latency and durability

Ready to Build This?

This expert-difficulty project could be your next micro-SaaS success.