Insurance for your integrations?

Often, customers look at our product's pricing objectively. You are charging X, but it'll cost me just Y to build it in-house or by hiring a consultant.

Or, this is a critical piece of my infrastructure. Should I outsource it?

What is often missed are the following —

• Most smart engineers despise working on integrations. They find them boring, mundane, and repetitive. They want to work on the exciting parts related to the product. Putting together an integrations team and then managing churn is a challenge.

  So, how do engineers make integration work exciting?
  They don’t. They just convince a junior to do it instead. 😆👨‍💻
  - ChatGPT

• Changes in the underlying API tend to cause problems after the integration is built. Do you have the bandwidth to hire a consultant to fix it? If you are building in-house, do you want to move that engineer working on that big product release to integrations?

• Is someone going to improve the integrations continually?

• How quickly can you get someone to fix an issue? Your customers are waiting. Integrations are often critical to product workflows, especially in the AI era.

• Your use case may evolve as your product grows. Is an expert just a Slack message away to guide you through the implementation?

Here's how to think about this instead —

Think of using an integrations platform as insurance for your integrations.

When you have implemented an integration platform, you can rest easy knowing that —

• The teams are focusing on integrations as their core business.

• They are available to fix any issues promptly and efficiently.

• They love building integrations (we are a weird bunch)

• All issues arising from underlying API changes are universally fixed for all customers.

A significant part of what you pay is for the quick support on Slack, which reduces your headaches and your customers' frustration.

So, have you insured your integrations?