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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T17:01:43+00:00

I’m building a SaaS application and want to expose IDs for resources which are

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I’m building a SaaS application and want to expose IDs for resources which are not tied to my current data storage implementation (Postgres auto-increment IDs). These Stack Overflow posts (one two) suggest that creating locally unique IDs is hard and that I might as well use UUIDs, which are of course easily and safely generated in pretty much any language.

I’m happy with this approach, but I wonder why I can’t find any APIs from big SaaS/hosted players which do the same? For example:

So basically nobody seems to use UUIDs. Is there a reason for this – not-invented-here, cleverer internal ID algorithms or something else? And in my case, in the absence of any internal algorithm, does it make most sense to go with UUIDs?

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  1. Editorial Team

    It’s possible that those other vendors you listed have their own ID or hashing scheme to allow them to expose a smaller number while using something more akin to a UUID internally. But in the end, the question must be asked: as long as your URIs are intended to be consumed by code (API clients) rather than humans, why would it matter?

    Don’t get too freaked out by what those vendors have done. There’s no guarantee that (a) they are doing the “right” thing and (b) that their needs are the same as yours.

    Go ahead and use UUIDs.

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