In Haskell you can generate a parser to a typed structure using library combinators and code generation: data DataMessage = DataMessage { company :: Text

In Haskell you can generate a parser to a typed structure using library combinators and code generation: data DataMessage = DataMessage { company :: Text } deriving (Show) $(deriveJSON defaultOptions ''DataMessage) data DataList = DataList { _data :: [DataMessage] } deriving (Show) $(deriveJSON defaultOptions { fieldLabelModifier = drop 1 } ''DataList) Which will fail properly when the data is malformed and in the real-world is even shorter, because you can set your data-type to protocol naming conventions and share them throughout. Then there isn't much bloat. You wrote your types and generated your way to parse them. You could test with: main = do print (encode (DataMessage "some-company")) print (decode "{\"company\":\"some-company\"}" :: Maybe DataMessage) print (encode (DataList [DataMessage "c1", DataMessage "c2", DataMessage "c3"])) print (decode "{\"data\":[{\"company\":\"c1\"},{\"company\":\"c2\"}]}" :: Maybe DataList) https://gist.github.com/b30f6f09a737dcc980e052b0f3d2a39e https://gist.github.com/b30f6f09a737dcc980e052b0f3d2a39e