The hidden costs of building product integrations in-house

Introduction

In today's competitive SaaS landscape, product integrations are often a must in delivering a top of the class product experience. Whether it’s syncing CRM data, connecting with communication tools, or integrating with ERP systems, the ability to work well with your customers key business tools can make or break your product’s appeal.

More often than not, engineering teams choose to build integrations completely in-house over relying on an external service, such as a unified API tool, an embedded iPaaS, or a next generation integrations platform like Nango. The rationale makes sense at first glance—if the integrations are so business critical, they should probably be built in-house to be future proof.

But here's the catch: building product integrations in-house comes with hidden costs that many companies overlook, or only realize too late into the journey. These costs can drain time, resources, and energy, and ultimately hinder product velocity and quality.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the three major hidden costs of building integrations in-house rather than using a specialized tool like Nango. By understanding these costs, you will have a clearer picture of whether building in-house is the right approach for you and your team, or if you should consider an external tool.

Hidden Cost One: Engineer Time & Resources

Building product integrations in-house often starts with a burst of excitement. After all, a Proof of Concept (PoC) can usually be done in a few hours, and you may feel like you’ve made leaps in progress.

In reality, you’re often barely scratching the surface after your PoC. The step between PoC and a production-ready integration requires far more effort than teams initially anticipate:

Understanding External APIs

Each API you integrate with has its quirks. External APIs can be complex and idiosyncratic. For example, understanding the full structure of an API is not just about figuring out which endpoints to call. You need to account for rate limits, error handling, and other API-specific nuances that can turn a seemingly simple task into a week-long project, such as:

• Dealing with (potentially) multiple authorized accounts
• Understanding how the API returns errors
• Undocumented limitations
• API-specific parameters (e.g. different base URLs for different data centers, account id, etc.)

Authentication & Security

Every external API comes with its own authentication methods, and they can differ a lot down to the minute details. The complexity here can be a nightmare. For example, you’ll need to think about:

• API keys, OAuth tokens, base URL requirements, and custom auth protocols
• Token refresh mechanisms to ensure the integration doesn’t break after a certain period
• Handling token-refresh race conditions and ensuring secure storage of authentication tokens

Abstraction and Scalability

Most teams find themselves, ironically, NOT future-proof when designing their integrations. Without the right abstraction layer, each new integration adds complexity, because each API is consumed differently based on the use case and external API structure. But the truth is, you simply cannot account for what future APIs you want to integrate. In fact, you would probably find yourself refactoring your entire integration framework after adding just a few integrations. This leads to wasted time on re-architecting solutions, and often a lack of consistency in how integrations are built.

Building Reliable Infrastructure

As mentioned before, product integrations aren’t just about making API calls. You need to build infrastructure that handles retries, queuing, back-pressure, rate-limit management, data validation, error handling, and more. Overall, you need to make sure to have mechanisms in place for:

• Having a reliable data sync infrastructure
• Making integrations scalable, such that you can handle a customer with 10x more data, or that you can handle 10x more customers
• Fairness between customers as integration volumes scale, so that smaller customers don’t have to wait for the sync of your largest customer to finish (imagine the complaints you’d be getting!)
• Resilience to temporary outages, recover from these, and ensuring no customer data is lost
• Handling webhooks with scalable, reliable, and resilient infra

User Interface Components

And let’s not forget the front-end. Building UI components for users to authenticate or manage integrations adds additional complexity. From user onboarding to troubleshooting, building an easy-to-use interface for users becomes an ongoing project on top of the integration itself.

All these tasks take a significant amount of time and effort—often weeks of an engineer’s time to build a single integration. When we multiply that by multiple integrations, the time taken away from engineers to focus on other core product work can add up quickly.

Hidden Cost Two: Slow Time to Market & Lower Product Velocity

Every SaaS company dreams of growing their customer base and winning high-value deals. Oftentimes this means building product integrations with your customer’s key business tools. However, each integration can take weeks to complete due to the complexities outlined in the previous section. Your time to market can be impacted negatively by building in-house, leading to lower product velocity and potential loss on enterprise deals. Specifically, here are the challenges you might run into:

Difficulty Committing to Integrations

Enterprise customers often require specific integrations as part of their deal. If your integration process is slow, you risk missing deadlines or, worse, not being able to fulfill the promises made during sales negotiations. When integrations take weeks or months, it’s hard to make commitments on when specific integrations will be available—and customers notice.

Engineering Resource Drain

Every product integration you build requires engineering resources. But fast-moving tech startups often can’t afford to dedicate a large chunk of an engineering team’s time to building integrations for weeks, if not months, at a time.

Plus, who even likes building external integrations to begin with? Working with an opaque external system that you have no control over inevitably requires you to make compromises and workarounds you are not fond of. Furthermore, the context switching needed to build product integrations one day, then refocus back on your core product development is nothing short of painful. You are likely pulled in multiple directions—fixing bugs, adding features, and maintaining integrations—making it difficult to maintain a consistent pace across the board.

Roadmap Blockers

A slow integration process also means that your product development timeline can stall. Ideally, product integrations should be continuously shipped and improved, just like any other product feature. However, if each integration requires weeks of engineering work, it’s hard to maintain consistent progress. Many SaaS companies will find themselves falling behind on their integrations roadmap, leaving customers frustrated with the lack of useful connections to the tools they use every day.

Instead of building in-house, using an end-to-end integrations platform like Nango can allow you ship integrations quickly and efficiently, freeing up your engineering resources to focus on other priorities. By accelerating time to market, you can meet customer demands faster, make commitments on integration timelines, and keep your roadmap on track.

Hidden Cost Three: Ongoing Maintenance and Support Needs

Even after you’ve shipped your product integrations, the work is far from over. Building integrations is not a one-time task; they require ongoing maintenance, updates, and monitoring to ensure they continue to function properly. Unfortunately, many teams underestimate just how much time and resources are needed to keep integrations running smoothly. Let’s break things down:

Production Breaks and Debugging

Inevitably, something will break in production, especially when dealing with third party systems outside of your control. Whether it’s due to a change in the external API, differing data formats from different customers, or edge cases you never considered, things will go wrong. Without robust observability tools and a solid debugging infrastructure, you’ll find yourself spending hours—if not days—troubleshooting and resolving issues. Some devs report spending up to 12 hours or more on debugging a single integration issue.

Lack of Observability

Without a clear view into the health of your product integrations, it’ll be challenging to maintain and improve them. Without proper monitoring and alerting, identifying issues and tracking down bugs becomes a guessing game, wasting time and leading to frustration.

A solid integrations framework should come with built-in observability tools to help you quickly diagnose and resolve problems, allowing you to maintain high uptime and keep customers happy. It’s especially important to have end-user-level observability, something that team building integrations in-house often overlook. Each end-user has different data and how they use the third party tool you’re integrated with. This leads to integrations breaking for a single user, so you will save yourself a lot of trouble by having user-level observability from the get-go.

Customer Support Burden

The more product integrations you have, the more likely customers are to run into issues in production. Without clear data validation and error handling, customers will flood your support channels asking, “Why isn’t this syncing?” or “Why is X missing?” As your product integrations catalog grows, the support burden grows exponentially—unless you’ve invested in a solid infrastructure to handle these challenges proactively.

Conclusion

Building product integrations in-house may seem like a cost-effective solution at first, but as we have discussed in this article, the hidden costs can quickly add up. From the long hours spent building and maintaining integrations, to potential lost deal opportunities due to slow time to market, and the constant need for infrastructure and debugging, building product integrations in-house is categorically NOT a one-week affair.

What’s the alternative, then? There are several ways to approach product integrations, as we have discussed in this article. Our view, of course, is that instead of building in-house, many B2B SaaS companies should consider an end-to-end integrations platform like Nango. Our platform comes with:

• 300+ pre-built integration templates with the most common business tools to get your team off the ground quickly
• Built-in integration-specific tooling to cover everything from observability, automatic retries, data validation, to API change handling, etc.
• Extensibility by design so you can build product integrations that are unique to your product and your customers’ needs

Have a question about building product integrations?

Reach out to our team or join our vibrant community—we’d love to say hi regardless if you’re building in-house or considering a third party tool.

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