Conduit's homepage on a laptop on a wooden desk, with a Conduit mug and a notebook beside it

The missing artifact

gateway.config.ts
import { Gateway, rateLimit, cache } from 'conduit'

export default new Gateway({
  routes: {
    '/api/users': {
      upstream: 'https://users.internal',
      middleware: [
        rateLimit({ max: 100, window: '1m' }),
        cache({ ttl: '5m', stale: '1h' }),
      ]
    }
  }
})

This is the product. The old site showed none of it.

Conduit's entire pitch is that gateway configuration lives in a file you can read and version. We counted the code on the old homepage and found zero characters of it. In its place sat a dashboard of business metrics, the one screen an engineer adopting a gateway never opens.

0 → 375

Characters of code

The config block plus both install commands

9 → 0

Actions behind a sales call

Request a Demo four times, Contact Sales four, Talk to an Expert once

25 → 1

Enterprise phrases

Estate four times, outcomes three, transformation twice, in 601 words

Hick's Law Every added choice slows the decision

The opening: from an API estate to a version string

Before

A 29-word sentence containing enterprise-grade, operationalize and mission-critical, then two buttons that both lead to a form.

After

A shell prompt, a headline that names its reader, and one action: copy the install command.

Evidence-based persuasion A number an engineer can check beats a number they cannot

Proof: from a commissioned study to milliseconds

The old page carried five figures across nine appearances: forty percent lower total cost of ownership, three point two times faster time to value, sixty percent less overhead. All sourced to a commissioned study, in a footnote set at 10px and 3.1 to 1.

Four figures replaced them, each with a unit and an explanation: 8ms median at the edge, five nines with the downtime budget spelled out as 26 seconds a month, 2.1 billion requests a day, 300 points of presence. Every one of them is falsifiable, which is what makes them persuasive.

Commitment escalation Ask for the smallest possible yes first

The close: from Contact Sales to one command

Before

A pricing section with no prices. Contact Sales appears five times here alone, three of them standing where a figure should be.

After

A million requests a month, free, no card. Procurement still happens, just after the gateway is already running.

The identity

Read the old headline aloud and most engineers guessed consulting.

The indigo gradient, the analyst band and the estate vocabulary added up to a services firm. A services firm is not something you install.

Conduit

Accelerate your API estate

Inter at five weights, one gradient running through the wordmark, the buttons and the stats. Fourteen-pixel radii on every surface, so nothing ranked above anything else.

conduit.dev

The API gateway that developers actually like

One flat green at 11.17 to 1, rationed to the prompt, the status dot and the copy button. Monospace marks everything the machine said, so the page can tell its own claims apart from its evidence.

Nobody believed the site was aimed at the wrong reader until we counted the code and found none.

Two things to keep honest. The new page still claims 2,100 teams shipped faster last month, which nobody can check and which should come out. And its four footer links render 21.5 pixels tall, under the 44 they need.

The explorations

Three directions were designed. One shipped.

Each was built as a full working page, not a mood board, so the choice was made against real type, real spacing and real interaction. All three are shown here, with the reason the two that lost did not ship.

1a Shipped

Terminal

terminal/dev aesthetic · green · code windows + live benchmarks

Leads with a readable request and a live benchmark, which is the first thing an engineer evaluating a gateway wants to see.

Open full page ↗
1b Not taken

Blueprint

navy + blue · blueprint grid · request-flow architecture diagram

Explained the architecture instead of showing the API. A request-flow diagram tells you the system exists; it still does not let you read a call.

Open full page ↗
1c Not taken

Daylight

clean light-mode docs style · green accent · dark code insets

Closest rival. Dropped because the dark code insets lost contrast on the light ground, and the benchmark figures stopped reading as live numbers.

Open full page ↗

In context

Conduit's homepage on a phone held in a café
Mobile
Conduit's homepage on a laptop and a phone on a dark desk
Desktop