On GCP, Cloud Endpoints proxies will transparently translate back and forth between protobufs and the canonical JSON, allowing either representation to be used. So if you're on GCP and don't care about vendor lock-in, that's a solution.

There is also the grpc-gateway project for JSON transcoding https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway

To be fair, if you chose gRPC for performance, but then end up using JSON for most of your traffic, perhaps you picked the wrong tool.

I don't think generally people want to have JSON accepted to use in their production workloads. More for development, testing, that kind of thing. Being able to just curl your service makes a huge difference.

It always starts that way, then people demand JSON everywhere ("why not?"), then they complain when things get too slow or when the OOMs begin to appear. :-)

You can use gRPC with FlatBuffers, too.

https://grpc.io/blog/flatbuffers

HTTP 1.1 + json support for twirp opens up a lot of doors too. It's easy for the browser to natively hit a twirp service without the need for large packages such as https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web.

Yes! In theory, gRPC has a way to pick custom serializers... but in practice, they are pretty clumsy to use and don't seem very well supported. There's a lot more benefit when you can guarantee that all servers will support JSON, too.