Skip the API, ship your database
If you give access to your DB directly, your API effectively becomes your API with all the contract obligations of the API. Suddenly you don't completely control your schema: you can't freely change it, you need to add things there for your clients only. I've seen it done multiple times and it always end up poorly. You save some time now by removing the need to build API, but later you end up spending much more time trying to decouple your internal representation from schema you made public.