If you ship APIs for a living, you already know the hard part isn’t launching a new version. It’s turning the old one off without setting your support queue on fire. That’s where real examples of deprecating an API version become gold. Seeing how others have handled timelines, communication, and breaking changes is far more useful than theory. In this guide, we’ll walk through examples of deprecating an API version: 3 practical examples from companies that have actually done it in production, plus several more patterns you can steal. We’ll look at how Stripe, GitHub, and Google structure deprecation cycles, how they communicate with developers, and what they do when customers simply don’t move. Along the way, we’ll pull out repeatable tactics you can adapt to your own API roadmap in 2024–2025, when security, uptime, and regulatory pressure are all pushing teams to retire legacy endpoints faster than ever.
If you work on APIs long enough, you learn one thing fast: breaking changes are expensive. That’s why teams are hungry for clear, modern examples of API versioning strategies explained in plain language, with real trade-offs. In this guide, we walk through the best examples of how successful organizations version their APIs, why they chose those patterns, and what you can realistically copy in your own stack. Instead of abstract theory, you’ll see concrete examples of API versioning strategies explained using URL paths, headers, content negotiation, and more. We’ll look at how companies like Stripe, GitHub, and Slack handle versioning, how mobile apps keep old clients alive, and how event-driven systems version their messages. Along the way, we’ll connect these patterns to current 2024–2025 trends: longer-lived APIs, stricter backward-compatibility expectations, and the pressure to move faster without breaking everyone. By the end, you’ll have a clear mental model and practical patterns you can apply on Monday morning.
If you’re hunting for real, concrete examples of header-based versioning in APIs examples, you’re in the right place. Header-based versioning is one of those patterns developers argue about on Twitter, but it quietly powers a lot of production systems at scale. Instead of cramming the version into the URL, APIs use HTTP headers like `Accept`, `X-API-Version`, or custom media types to tell the server which version of the contract the client wants. In this guide, we’ll walk through practical examples of header-based versioning in APIs examples drawn from public APIs, common enterprise patterns, and patterns recommended by standards bodies and major platforms. You’ll see how real organizations encode versions in headers, how they negotiate content types, and how they plan for 2024–2025 realities like mobile clients that can’t update overnight and microservices that need to evolve independently. Along the way, we’ll compare trade-offs, show you concrete request/response snippets, and highlight where this strategy shines—and where it bites.