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I never understood the raison d'être of such pipe-connecting services for B2Bs. If some data flow is business-critical, why would I want to outsource (and route

by marban 3y ago

I never understood the raison d'être of such pipe-connecting services for B2Bs. If some data flow is business-critical, why would I want to outsource (and route) an already fragile interconnection to yet another party? Since you're addressing developers, I assume they should know how to plug into an API.

esafak 3y ago
Wouldn't it be easier to share the work of updating the integration code when the API evolves?
kspacewalk2 3y ago
Use it as a starting point, don't blindly update, fork if necessary, periodically reconcile with upstream in order to keep up with API changes.
btown 3y ago
If you have a stable global long-term API key for a global API that you use without regards to your users' tenancy on that platform, then absolutely - just put it in your 12-factor env or other secret storage, and start developing! But if, for every integrated service, you need to build out a custom URL to receive OAuth tokens after an authorization flow, and a database to securely store them, and a reliable background task to periodically refresh them... then you're doing a ton of work before you can even access a Salesforce or Quickbooks object on behalf of your clients. Having a service that can orchestrate all of this can make it as easy to work with as a stable API key, and then you just need to do the work.
bastienbeurier 3y ago
(Nango co-founder here) We help teams who don't have the resources or expertise to build & maintain integrations. Sometimes, they need to build a lot, complex or scalable ones, or they want to invest their energy elsewhere. Building integrations comes with specific challenges (security, ETL, etc.), which are usually not the core competency of SaaS teams. We often see that problems related to building integrations are underestimated and can spiral in terms of engineering costs. Authorization in itself is complex, data synchronization even more so!
throwawaysleep 3y ago
Speed to market. Things don’t need to work that well to be sold. One of my employers has entire integrations that don’t work and we still sell them to the business types successfully. They then file a bug ticket and wait months until we get to it, them paying fees all the way.
- alxmng 3y ago
  Enterprise sales is essentially just promising more and more features that don’t exist until they sign a contract, then developing the crappiest least-effort implementation to not lose the contract.
  - throwawaysleep 3y ago
    That’s my anecdotal experience. So this library fits perfectly with that goal.
dyeje 3y ago
You want to outsource so you can focus on building your product instead of integrations which are costly to build and maintain. Also it’s not easy to come up with these universal mappings, why reinvent the wheel? It’s unlikely that your integrations are differentiating but it is likely they enable you to close deals.

by marban 3y ago

esafak 3y ago

Wouldn't it be easier to share the work of updating the integration code when the API evolves?

kspacewalk2 3y ago

Use it as a starting point, don't blindly update, fork if necessary, periodically reconcile with upstream in order to keep up with API changes.

btown 3y ago

If you have a stable global long-term API key for a global API that you use without regards to your users' tenancy on that platform, then absolutely - just put it in your 12-factor env or other secret storage, and start developing! But if, for every integrated service, you need to build out a custom URL to receive OAuth tokens after an authorization flow, and a database to securely store them, and a reliable background task to periodically refresh them... then you're doing a ton of work before you can even access a Salesforce or Quickbooks object on behalf of your clients. Having a service that can orchestrate all of this can make it as easy to work with as a stable API key, and then you just need to do the work.

bastienbeurier 3y ago

(Nango co-founder here) We help teams who don't have the resources or expertise to build & maintain integrations. Sometimes, they need to build a lot, complex or scalable ones, or they want to invest their energy elsewhere. Building integrations comes with specific challenges (security, ETL, etc.), which are usually not the core competency of SaaS teams. We often see that problems related to building integrations are underestimated and can spiral in terms of engineering costs. Authorization in itself is complex, data synchronization even more so!

throwawaysleep 3y ago

Speed to market. Things don’t need to work that well to be sold. One of my employers has entire integrations that don’t work and we still sell them to the business types successfully. They then file a bug ticket and wait months until we get to it, them paying fees all the way.

alxmng 3y ago
Enterprise sales is essentially just promising more and more features that don’t exist until they sign a contract, then developing the crappiest least-effort implementation to not lose the contract.
- throwawaysleep 3y ago
  That’s my anecdotal experience. So this library fits perfectly with that goal.

dyeje 3y ago

You want to outsource so you can focus on building your product instead of integrations which are costly to build and maintain. Also it’s not easy to come up with these universal mappings, why reinvent the wheel? It’s unlikely that your integrations are differentiating but it is likely they enable you to close deals.