When municipal budgets run dry, bloated API payloads aren't just bad architecture. They burn public money. Last year, our civic tech dashboard lit up with thousands of local transit requests where mobile apps tossed out ninety percent of the JSON we sent them. We relied on old REST endpoints built a decade ago, forcing every client to swallow the exact same rigid structure.
Devs default to REST because the tooling just works and routing takes five minutes. But public sector apps break that mold. A neighborhood group running on five-year-old Android phones needs tiny payloads to map broken streetlights. At the same time, an academic studying urban density needs deep relational queries connecting zoning laws, transit stops, and census tracts all at once. Trying to serve both with standard REST meant spawning a dozen brittle endpoints or making low-income citizens download massive, monolithic documents.
We moved our core civic data layer to GraphQL. The win was immediate client-specified querying. Instead of maintaining separate endpoints for web and mobile, we deployed one schema. Now our mobile app asks for just the coordinates and status ID of a pothole. The research dashboard grabs the entire relational graph down to the last municipal amendment. Network traffic dropped in the first month, stretching our cloud hosting budget without asking taxpayers for a dime.
The migration hurt. Caching got messy because clients could write arbitrary queries instead of hitting predictable URI paths. We had to build persistent queries on the server side to stop resource exhaustion attacks and let our CDN actually cache responses. We also spent weeks writing strict type definitions so legacy municipal databases mapped into a clean graph without leaking internal IDs.
Infrastructure in civic tech carries real weight. When we ship tools that respect bandwidth limits, we lower the barrier for civic participation. We help local journalists and neighborhood hackers build software that holds governments accountable. By adopting GraphQL, we stopped dictating how people consume public data and let them query it on their own terms.
