ORPC + Hono: Type-Safe APIs from Edge to Client

Building modern full-stack applications requires balancing performance, developer experience, and type safety. ORPC and Hono together provide a powerful combination that delivers all three—creating lightning-fast, type-safe APIs from the edge runtime to your frontend clients.

The Perfect Partnership

Hono and ORPC complement each other perfectly, each handling distinct concerns in your API architecture:

Hono is an ultrafast web framework designed for edge computing. It provides the HTTP foundation—routing, middleware, CORS, and request/response handling—with minimal overhead and blazing performance. Think of Hono as your API's infrastructure layer.

ORPC is a type-safe RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework that sits on top of HTTP frameworks. It provides end-to-end type safety, automatic client generation, and powerful integrations like TanStack Query. Think of ORPC as your API's business logic layer.

Together, they create a separation of concerns that scales beautifully:

Frontend (Next.js/Astro)
    ↓ Type-safe calls
ORPC Layer (Business Logic)
    ↓ Procedures & validation
Hono Layer (HTTP Infrastructure)
    ↓ Middleware & routing
Edge Runtime (Cloudflare/Vercel)

Why Hono for the Foundation

Hono excels as the HTTP layer because it's built for modern edge computing. Traditional frameworks like Express were designed for traditional servers with abundant resources, but edge environments demand different characteristics.

Hono delivers exceptional performance with sub-millisecond routing, minimal bundle size (under 10KB), and near-instant cold starts. It's built on Web Standards APIs (Request/Response), making it truly framework-agnostic—it runs on Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, Node.js, and Vercel Edge Functions without modification.

The framework provides essential middleware out of the box: CORS, authentication, compression, and logging. This lets you handle cross-cutting concerns at the HTTP level before reaching your business logic. Hono also integrates seamlessly with authentication solutions like Better Auth, giving you secure session management with minimal configuration.

Why ORPC for the Logic Layer

While Hono handles HTTP brilliantly, ORPC adds something Hono alone cannot: end-to-end type safety between your API and frontend clients. When you define a procedure in ORPC, your frontend automatically knows the input types, output types, and even error types—no code generation step required.

ORPC provides first-class integrations that go beyond basic RPC. Its TanStack Query integration gives you automatic caching, optimistic updates, and background refetching in React applications. The file upload/download support handles blobs and streams natively. WebSocket hibernation support makes real-time features work seamlessly on edge platforms like Cloudflare.

The framework is validation-first, using Zod to ensure data integrity. Every input is validated before reaching your handlers, preventing invalid data from corrupting your business logic. Errors are type-safe too—your frontend knows exactly which error codes to expect and handle.

Most importantly, ORPC is framework-agnostic for clients. The same API works with Next.js, Astro, Vue, Svelte, or vanilla JavaScript. Your backend defines the procedures once, and every frontend gets type-safe access automatically.

The Synergy

When combined, Hono and ORPC create an architecture where each tool does what it does best. Hono handles authentication middleware, CORS policies, rate limiting, and request logging. ORPC handles input validation, business logic, and type-safe client communication.

This separation makes your codebase more maintainable. HTTP concerns stay in Hono middleware. Business logic lives in ORPC procedures. Validation schemas are reusable across procedures. Your frontend gets automatic type inference without manual type definitions.

The performance impact is negligible—ORPC's runtime overhead is minimal, and Hono's speed ensures your API responds in milliseconds even on edge networks closest to your users.

Conclusion

ORPC and Hono represent the modern approach to building APIs: lightweight infrastructure paired with powerful type safety. Hono provides the speed and flexibility needed for edge computing, while ORPC adds the developer experience and safety needed for maintainable applications.

Whether you're building a SaaS platform, an e-commerce API, or internal microservices, this combination delivers production-ready APIs that are fast, type-safe, and delightful to work with. The edge-first architecture ensures your users experience minimal latency regardless of their location, while your developers enjoy instant feedback and catch errors at compile time rather than runtime.

Together, Hono and ORPC prove that you don't have to choose between performance and developer experience—you can have both.