Product integrations: Build or buy?

Introduction

Integrations are a key part of modern software ecosystems. They connect your product with the tools your customers already use, making your offering increasingly more enticing and indispensable.

When building product integrations, many developers and product managers face the timeless dilemma of "build vs. buy."

But deciding whether to build these integrations in-house or purchase a third-party solution isn’t trivial. The decision you ultimately make can ripple through your product’s scalability, your team’s focus, and your end customers’ experience.

This blog post dives into the pros and cons of building in-house versus buying third-party integrations solutions, offering a practical framework to help you make a choice tailored to your needs.

By the end, we’ll also introduce an alternative that combines the best of both worlds.

P.S. This post is inspired by the great talk given by Colin Loretz at RailsConf in 2022 - check it out!

Key Considerations for Build vs. Buy Decisions

Before diving into the specifics, here are some factors to weigh as you approach the decision of build vs. buy:

1. Scalability: Can your solution handle future growth and integration complexity?
2. Reliability and maintenance: What’s required to ensure a robust and long-lasting solution?
3. Speed vs. ownership: How critical is speed to market versus full control over your integrations?

Understanding these trade-offs is critical. Taking into consideration the factors discussed above, let’s now examine the pros and cons of building in-house vs. relying on a third party tool.

The Pros and Cons of Building Integrations

Building integrations in-house means crafting solutions that are entirely within your control. But that freedom comes with its own challenges as we will outline below.

Pros of Building In-House

1. Full control over developer and customer experience:
2. You have full control over the entire integration lifecycle, from architecture to UX. This is invaluable when tailoring the experience exactly to your customers’ unique needs.
3. Develop in-house expertise and custom frameworks:
4. Developing integrations internally helps your team build expertise and potentially establish frameworks that can be reused across future projects.

Cons of Building

Much like an iceberg, at the surface-level, the costs of building integrations in-house may seem manageable, but below the waterline are a handful hidden costs:

1. Implementation delays: Every API is different, and most teams underestimate the things they have to change for each individual API (auth, rate-limit handling, etc.). As a result, you might face delays in implementation due to unanticipated API-specific challenges.
2. Engineering resource drain: Every hour spent building integrations is an hour not spent on core product development.
3. Scalability and maintenance challenges: Building in-house requires careful planning to ensure the integrations can handle increasing demands, not to mention the need for ongoing maintenance and updates to keep all your integrations running smoothly.

Explore our post on the hidden costs of building product integrations in-house for a deeper dive.

When Does Building Make Sense?

So, the benefits of building in-house seem to revolve around control and flexibility, but the drawbacks are many. When does it make sense to double down on building integrations in-house, then? In our view, when the following two conditions are met concurrently, building integrations in-house could be a good choice for your team.

• Integrations are core to your business: If your product’s differentiation depends on its integrations, building in-house ensures full control.
• Your internal team has expertise: If your team has significant experience in building integrations, you can execute more efficiently and avoid costly pitfalls. (Side note: This is rare; in our experience, devs who’ve dealt with integrations tend to be more cognizant of the drawbacks of building in-house, thus nudging them toward buying instead.)

The Pros and Cons of Buying Integrations

Buying a third-party solution like an Embedded iPaaS or Unified API for building integrations can drastically reduce time to market and offload some technical burdens, but it comes with its own set of limitations. Let’s take a look below:

Pros of Buying

1. Faster time to market: Pre-built solutions can save weeks—or even months—of development time, enabling you to launch faster and compete more effectively.
2. Offloading infrastructure and maintenance: A good vendor handles uptime, updates, and maintenance, freeing up your team to focus on core product features.

Cons of Buying

1. Vendor lock-in: Dependence on a third-party provider limits flexibility and introduces risks if the vendor changes pricing or discontinues support.
2. Limited customization: While vendors offer templates to get you started quickly, you may hit walls when trying to implement use cases that are specific to your product or industry, which is often the case once teams dig deeper into integrations.
3. Long-term cost at scale: The "rental" model can become expensive over time as your integration needs grow. Many third party vendors may look affordable in the beginning, but the costs can go up drastically at scale.

When Does Buying Third Party Integrations Solutions Make Sense?

When the following two conditions are met, choosing a third party vendor to help with building product integrations could be a sound decision.

• Speed to market is critical: If shipping many integrations quickly is a priority, buying saves time and effort.
• Simple use cases: When your product-specific needs align with pre-built templates offered by Unified APIs and Embedded iPaaS, buying is often more practical than building from scratch.

A Framework for Decision-Making

In this section, we present a framework to help you navigate the build vs. buy decision. When making your decision, consider the following factors:

1. Team capacity and expertise: Does your team have the bandwidth and experience to build integrations in-house without compromising other priorities?
2. Company goals and product roadmap: How does this decision align with your broader objectives?
3. Cost analysis: Don’t just weigh upfront costs—factor in long-term costs and opportunity costs (i.e. what your team isn’t building because they’re focused on integrations).
4. Risks: Will building in-house strain your team and present future bottlenecks? How reliable and scalable is your third party integrations solution?

Is There a Sweet Spot Between Build and Buy?

By this point, you might be thinking:

Clearly both options come with their own benefits and drawbacks, but is there a solution that combines both the flexibility and scalability of building in-house AND the efficiency and speed of using a third-party tool?

As Colin has demonstrated in his RailsConf talk, this can exist.

We call this (new) category product integrations infrastructure. This isn’t a Unified API or an Embedded iPaaS, but something much more powerful.

What exactly does a product integrations infrastructure entail?

• Lets you get started quickly with pre-built templates
• Comes with built-in tooling and infrastructure to customize integrations to your product
• Offers access to Enterprise API experts (Netsuite, Workday, Salesforce, SAP, etc.), Sandbox accounts, and custom integration building services

We see Nango as a good example of the product integrations platform category.

Our founding team combined has 30+ years in building B2B SaaS, and having a scalable infrastructure dedicated to building product integrations was a topic that resurfaced time and again. When building our previous startups, we faced the same dilemma with product integrations—we needed something fast and scalable but didn’t want to sacrifice control.

So, to scratch our own itch, we built Nango by combining pre-built infrastructure with built-in integration-specific devtools and extensibility, creating a solution that met both immediate and long-term needs.

With Nango, you can:

• Ship quickly: Get integrations up and running fast, something you often can’t achieve by building integrations in-house.
• Maintain control: Unlike traditional Embedded iPaaS or Unified API solutions, Nango offers a customizable and developer-first platform that grows with your needs.‍
• Future-proof your integrations: Built-in observability and scalability mean you won’t hit a wall as your demands and customer base evolve and scale into the future.

Related: learn more about the different approaches to building product integrations and see how Nango’s solution is different from building in-house, embedded iPaaS, and pre-built only unified APIs.

Conclusion

The build vs. buy decision is nuanced—there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Context matters, and the right choice depends on your team’s capacity, goals, and the importance of integrations to your product.

That said, the decision doesn’t have to be binary. A solution like Nango can give you the best of both worlds: speed to market, scalability, and long-term maintainability.

As you weigh your options, remember: the key is to make a choice that aligns with your team’s strengths, your product roadmap, and your overall business goals.

Useful Resources

Four ways to build product integration and their pros and cons

The hidden costs of building product integration in-house

How to build integrations you and your cusomers love

How is Nango different from Embedded iPaaS and Unified APIs

Our dev community for insights and questions on building product integrations

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