For B2B SaaS, integrations are the connections between your product and customers' existing tech stacks, enabling efficient business processes. However, as your customer base grows, attempting to scale these integrations in-house can quickly become an operational nightmare.
At scale, the problem isn't only technical; it impacts your entire organization. Here are three things that often break when SaaS companies attempt to build in-house customer integrations at scale:
- People
- Processes
- Platform
Let's see how these weaknesses show themselves, and how an embedded iPaaS like Prismatic can change the equation.
When your people break
The first casualty of disorganized integration development is your engineering team and its focus. As the number and complexity of integrations increases, your team can easily become overwhelmed and frustrated.
Engineering resources are diverted
When you add in-house integrations into the mix, your engineering load can quickly shift from 80% product/20% integrations to 50% product/50% integrations or worse. This creates what amounts to an integration tax, where the opportunity cost of not building a new product feature outweighs the initial cost savings of building integrations in-house. This can affect morale, creating long-term frustration within your team.
Prismatic mitigates this engineering drain by empowering your non-dev teams to build integrations with the low-code designer and handle integration setup, configuration, and troubleshooting via a detailed support UI. This frees devs to focus on product innovation, with users reporting up to 95% savings in engineering time.
Recruiting becomes a bottleneck
When you build integrations in-house, you need devs who understand your core product (since that's the primary app they'll be integrating with) but who also have senior-level knowledge of APIs, auth, webhooks, security, compliance, and a host of other specialized areas. These requirements make recruiting and hiring devs for integrations more difficult and time-intensive.
Prismatic includes everything necessary to build, deploy, and manage integrations, including flexible development options for low-code and code-native. Devs and non-devs alike can leverage the platform without needing to master the backend, making recruitment easier and faster since the pool of possible hires is that much larger.
Support escalation ties up engineering
When an in-house integration breaks, support teams often lack the diagnostic tools and access to troubleshoot beyond very basic connectivity status. As a result, the issue immediately escalates to engineering and requires more time (even for straightforward issues) than it should.
Prismatic's management dashboards provide support teams with deep visibility into integration status and performance, enabling efficient troubleshooting without constant engineering escalations. This cuts resolution time and increases customer satisfaction.
When your processes break
When scaling breaks your process, maintenance issues multiply, best practices get lost in the urgency, and new feature development comes to a halt. Integrations, which were added to the product to make things better for customers, have become a huge operational time and money sink.
Constant external changes
API changes are a primary concern for in-house integration builders. Third-party systems regularly update API schemas, change auth rules, or deprecate endpoints, often with little or no warning. With 10 integrations, your team might have a handful of updates to do every month. With 100 integrations, you may be able to keep the entire team busy with API changes.
Prismatic maintains a library of built-in API connectors and keeps them up to date with API, auth, and other changes. This allows your devs to avoid constant manual interventions and updates for integrations with commonly used connectors.
Lack of standardization
In-house integrations are usually custom-coded to meet specific requirements for auth, error handling, logging, deployment, and more. This approach leads to multiple issues:
- Troubleshooting is troublesome – Devs can't easily jump in to fix a bug or perform an update for an integration they are not already familiar with.
- Patching is painful – Fixes for things such as security vulnerabilities or pagination rule changes must be applied individually to every single integration.
- Code reuse is uncommon – Similar logic (such as token refreshes for OAuth) is recreated for every integration.
Prismatic promotes standardization through its low-code designer and AI-enabled code-native development, both of which encourage best practices across integrations. You can roll out fixes and other updates platform-wide by leveraging standard CI/CD pipelines, minimizing the number of unique touches required per integration.
Stalled product development
As the integration drain on dev resources grows, it becomes harder to stay aligned with your core product roadmap. Instead of building out the features that will help differentiate your product, devs are doing their best to keep the tower of integrations from toppling.
Prismatic accelerates development by enabling rapid builds with pre-built connectors and logic components, coupled with deployments through the in-app marketplace. This streamlined process means your team can build and deploy integrations in days or weeks rather than months, preserving roadmap momentum and turning integrations into a growth accelerator.
When your platform breaks
Building a powerful, reliable platform for customer integrations is a huge undertaking. Building it (or substantial portions of it) hundreds of times to account for all the integration variations across customers is nearly impossible. But that's what many SaaS companies try to do with in-house integrations.
Overlooked failure infrastructure
Handling API rate limiting, automatic retries, detailed error messaging, and more adds enormous complexity to integrations. Building this infrastructure once is challenging, but managing hundreds of custom implementations of this logic, all running 24/7 for customers, requires a dedicated platform team made up of senior devs.
Prismatic builds this functionality in its platform from the ground up. Features such as automatic retries (with exponential backoff) and error handling are standard and centrally managed, ensuring reliable operation without requiring a team to oversee custom failure-handling logic for each integration.
Alert fatigue and integration noise
Every integration connection is a potential point of failure. Without a centralized logging and monitoring system for the integrations, your existing observability tools can easily become overwhelmed with noise. As a result, it becomes nearly impossible to spot a critical, systemic issue amid all the standard alert messaging (for things like failed connections).
Prismatic addresses this with monitoring dashboards, alerts and detailed logs (that can stream to external tools like DataDog). This reduces noise by providing focused oversight, enabling teams to identify and resolve the majority of integration issues before customers even notice.
Missing customer self-service UX
Your in-house solution often lacks a proper, customer-facing dashboard for activation, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. This lack of UI means every customer request or issue requires back-and-forth internally (usually between support and engineering) and with the customer. This doesn't scale.
Prismatic provides an embedded integration marketplace where customers can self-activate and configure integrations and access self-serve support dashboards. For the ultimate self-service experience, customers can use the embedded workflow builder to create their own one-off workflows. All of this empowers customers, scaling onboarding and support without proportional team growth.
Make integrations assets, not liabilities
The main problem with developing integrations in-house is that doing so usually makes them a cost center that pulls critical resources away from core product development.
By implementing Prismatic, you can reclaim control over your people (by democratizing tasks and freeing up engineers), your processes (by leveraging efficiencies and enforcing standards), and your platform (by ensuring reliability and visibility).
This change helps you avoid the downsides of in-house integration scaling and creates the foundation for a sustainable integration strategy.
Check out our free trial to see if Prismatic could be the key to solving your integration scaling challenge.
