Remember when you thought building that first integration would be easy? Six months later, after countless late nights spent debugging API inconsistencies and reworking auth, your team finally shipped something that barely meets your customers' needs. Sound familiar?
We get it. You want to keep integration development in-house to maintain control over effort, cost, and quality. The logic seems sound: why incur third-party expenses when you have talented devs who can build what you need?
No matter how attractive that logic may be, however, it doesn't hold up to reality.
We know because we used to be right where you are now. We ran a B2B SaaS company where our integrations were a key part of the value we provided to customers. At the time, building in-house was the only option, as embedded iPaaS platforms weren't available. Our integration needs grew significantly, to the point where we were allocating 50% of our engineering resources in a given quarter solely to them. And that took our devs away from building features that would make our product continue to stand out from its competitors.
That's why we built Prismatic, our embedded iPaaS platform. We learned the hard way that integration infrastructure isn't something a B2B SaaS company should be recreating with every new integration it builds.
Overcoming core assumptions
Let's discuss why you may believe building integrations in-house is the right approach.
"We don't have to pay a third party"
This is the one that seems the shiniest. However, building integrations always requires more resources than expected – devs who could be shipping core features, infrastructure costs that compound with each deployed integration, specialized tools for monitoring and debugging integration flows, and the list goes on.
And the opportunity costs are real. Every hour your devs spend wrestling with a recalcitrant API or debugging a flaky webhook setup is an hour not spent on product features that make your product more attractive to prospects.
"We'll have complete control"
Control is an illusion when you're building integrations (including infrastructure) from scratch. Maintenance quickly turns into a nightmare as APIs and auth methods change, and edge cases multiply. Time to market is embarrassingly slow since each integration requires custom development, testing, and deployment processes.
Meanwhile, your customers have high expectations. They expect integrations to work reliably, handle errors gracefully, and support the specific workflows they've built their businesses around. When your custom integration breaks at 2 AM, you'll be the ones in complete control of the support ticket.
"But our devs can do it!"
Your devs absolutely can build integrations. And that's far from the only thing they can do. They could code entirely new operating systems if needed. But the question isn't if they can do it – it's whether they should. For integrations, the question is whether figuring out all the integration plumbing is the best use of your devs.
Most devs actively dislike working on integrations. They often find them painful and repetitive, noting that they rarely involve the kind of problem-solving that drew them to engineering in the first place. From their perspective, integration development entails debugging API inconsistencies, handling pagination and rate limits, and repeatedly writing the same auth flows.
"We have unique needs"
Every B2B SaaS company believes its integration requirements are unique. The reality? While your business logic might be unique, there are only so many different integration patterns. And everyone (no matter what industry or vertical) is going to use some variation of those same patterns.
Having unique needs doesn't mean you should build unique integration development tools and processes from scratch. However, you would benefit from a flexible integration platform that you can easily adapt to your specific requirements and business approach.
How embedded iPaaS addresses these challenges
An embedded iPaaS such as Prismatic solves the fundamental problems that make in-house integration development unworkable if you have (or need) more than a handful of integrations.
Scalability without the infrastructure headache
Instead of building and maintaining your own connector library, you get access to pre-built connectors that handle the heavy lifting of API communication, auth, and error handling. You'll need to build a custom connector for your own product's API, but you can use existing connectors to integrate with the other apps your customers use.
The platform offloads all the infrastructure concerns – scaling, monitoring, updates, compliance requirements – so your team can focus on the business logic that drives value for your customers.
Predictable costs that scale with your business
Traditional integration development involves unpredictable resource spikes. One customer needs a simple Jira integration; another wants a fancy three-way integration with Salesforce, Slack, and your app, and the next thing you know, you are pulling devs off critical projects or trying to get some room in the budget for multiple new hires.
Embedded iPaaS pricing should scale predictably with increasing numbers of integrations and customers. You can budget accurately and avoid the unpredictable up-and-down cycle of in-house integration development that hobbles your ability to plan engineering resources effectively.
Core business benefits
The most significant advantage may not even be what an embedded iPaaS does for your integrations – it's what it does for your core business. Your devs are freed up to work on features that differentiate your product and drive competitive advantage.
Instead of reacting to integration requests as they come in from customers, you can proactively implement scalable and sustainable workflows tailored to your specific needs. This shift from a reactive to a proactive integration strategy makes everything related to building, deploying, and managing integrations more consistent and quantifiable, greatly reducing integration-related surprises for your dev team and everyone else.
Dramatically improved customer experience
When robust, reliable integrations can be deployed quickly, customer churn decreases, and time to value improves. Customers can connect your product to existing workflows right away rather than waiting months for a custom-built in-house integration.
The effect is significant: happier customers, faster growth with existing accounts, and positive referrals based on first-class integration experiences.
Rapid response to market needs
Opportunities don't wait for your engineering team. When a prospect needs integrations with a system you don't currently support, an embedded iPaaS enables you to add new integrations in days rather than months.
This also positively impacts your sales conversations. Instead of, "We can build that integration in Q3," you can say, "Let's turn that on for you this week."
How to change your mind (and your approach)
Making the shift from in-house development to embedded iPaaS requires substantial changes in how you currently think about and execute your integration strategy. Here are some of the things you'll need to do.
Document current state
Start by honestly capturing what you're doing today. How much dev time goes into integration development and maintenance? How much non-dev time? What's your average time to market for new integrations? How often do existing integrations fail, and how long does it take to resolve those issues?
Don't forget hidden costs: infrastructure expenses, logging tools, support overhead, and the opportunity cost of dev capacity that could be applied to core product development.
Select the right embedded iPaaS partner
The right embedded iPaaS should be an extension of your existing team and your current workflow. Here are some factors you should consider for evaluating an embedded iPaaS:
- Is the vendor's focus on embedded iPaaS? Or is the embedded iPaaS just one of several products it has brought to market?
- Does the platform provide an exceptional developer experience? Does it have an API and CLI that lets you write entire integrations in code and work with existing tools and processes? Does it have comprehensive docs?
- Does the platform support non-devs well? Can they assemble simple integrations with the low-code designer? Can they onboard customers without engineering assistance? Does the platform provide them with everything they need to troubleshoot and fix straightforward issues with deployed integrations?
- Can you build the specific integrations you need today (and will it support you tomorrow)? In addition to having a low-code designer and pre-built API connectors, does the platform allow you to code robust custom connectors for any API?
- Does the platform enable you to deploy and manage integrations at scale? Is its infrastructure scalable? Does it allow non-devs to troubleshoot and support integrations?
- Does the platform provide a great user experience for your customers? Can they configure, activate, and troubleshoot integrations? Can they use an embedded workflow builder to create their own integrations with your product? Can they integrate with non-SaaS apps running in their local networks?
Build your first integration, then do another
Start with a single integration that represents meaningful customer value. Go through the entire process – building, testing, deploying, and customer onboarding. Learn from what you just did; refine your overall process and repeat it.
This hands-on experience will reveal benefits that aren't obvious from vendor demos or docs. You'll see how much faster development cycles become and how much cleaner your codebase stays when the embedded iPaaS abstracts away integration complexity. Your team will be writing, testing, deploying, and maintaining a lot less code than before.
Reorganize roles for scale
Embedded iPaaS enables a different organizational structure for integrations. Instead of requiring experienced devs for every integration, you can have non-devs or junior devs handle much of the integration logic while more experienced devs focus on architecture and core product features.
Define clear roles for who handles integration requests, how business requirements are translated into integration workflows, and how teams can deploy and support integrations without engineering involvement.
Communicate the changes
Keep everyone informed about the improvements you're seeing, including faster development, reduced overhead, happier customers, and increased capacity for core product development.
This helps build confidence in the embedded iPaaS approach, making it easier for you to create more and better integrations without expanding your development team.
Win the future
Doing integrations in-house isn't the way to win the future of B2B SaaS. While you're debugging webhook failures and managing API rate limits, competitors are leveraging embedded iPaaS to ship integrations in days and focusing their engineering talent on core product features.
The ROI for embedded iPaas is both immediate and long-term. The question isn't whether you'll eventually move to an embedded iPaaS – it's whether you'll make the move soon enough to gain a competitive integration advantage.
Regardless of what you've built in the past, an embedded iPaaS is the only way to scale integrations without compromising core product development. You can free up dev resources, increase revenue through faster time to market, and make your customers significantly happier.
Schedule a demo, and let us show you how Prismatic helps you build the integrations your customers need today and in the future.
