What platforms gain from working with a unified API provider

If you work in partnerships or business development at a software platform, there's a good chance someone from a unified API provider has already reached out to you. Maybe it was us at Apideck. Maybe it was a competitor.

The instinct that usually follows is skepticism. Another middleware company asking for access to your API. Another layer wedged between your platform and the companies building on top of it. Why would you want that?

It's a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a pitch. So here is ours.

What is a unified API provider?

A unified API provider builds and maintains connectors to multiple platforms inside a single software category, then gives B2B software companies one standardized API to reach all of them.

Take a B2B SaaS company that needs to connect to several accounting platforms: QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, FreshBooks, and a handful more. On its own, that team has to read each platform's API docs, build a separate connector for each, handle a different authentication method every time, normalize data across schemas that rarely agree, and then keep all of it working as those APIs change. Months of engineering per platform, and the maintenance never ends.

Through a unified API provider like Apideck, the same company integrates once per category. We build and maintain the underlying connectors, handle authentication through Vault (which keeps your platform's own branded OAuth experience intact), normalize responses into a consistent model, and absorb the ongoing maintenance. They ship the integration once, and it works across every supported platform in that category.

Apideck maintains more than 200 connectors across seven unified APIs: Accounting, HRIS, CRM, ATS, Ecommerce, File Storage, and Issue Tracking. Over 200 B2B SaaS and fintech companies build on that infrastructure.

How this differs from an embedded iPaaS

You have probably been approached by embedded iPaaS providers too, and the difference between the two models matters most from where you sit as a platform.

An embedded iPaaS gives a B2B software company a visual workflow builder that lives inside its product. When that company's customers (the people using your platform every day) set up an integration, they work through the iPaaS interface, configuring workflows and mapping fields in a third-party layer. The iPaaS effectively becomes another product your customers have to learn.

A unified API provider stays out of view. The B2B software company's engineers build the integration straight into their product against a developer-friendly API. Your customers never touch Apideck. What they see is that your platform is natively supported inside the product they already use, so the integration reads as a native part of that product.

That difference has consequences for you. When a company connects to your platform through Apideck, your customers still authenticate through your own branded OAuth flow, and no third-party interface ever sits between your platform and the companies that rely on it.

What this means for your platform

Every company that builds on Apideck and switches on your connector is a company whose product now integrates with your platform. That creates value in three directions.

Your platform becomes stickier

Every integration running through Apideck makes your platform harder to leave. Once your customers wire their workflows into your product through the other tools they already run, the cost of switching to a competitor climbs. The more your ecosystem connects to, the deeper your platform sits in their daily operations.

The retention data is consistent on this. ProfitWell's Integration Benchmarks study, drawn from 500,000 software companies, found that products with at least one integration see 10 to 15% higher retention, climbing to 18 to 22% once a product has four or more. Willingness to pay moves the same way: products with integrations command around 20% more from customers using five to ten of them, and over 30% more once customers pass eleven.

For a platform, that math runs in your favor. Every integration pointing at your API gives a customer one more reason to stay. And unlike the features you would otherwise have to build and keep alive yourself, integrations delivered through a unified API provider cost your engineering team nothing.

The buying side points in the same direction. Gartner's 2024 Global Software Buying Trends report, based on a survey of 2,499 B2B software buyers, found that a vendor's ability to support integrations is the top sales-related factor in a purchase decision, named by 44% of respondents. So integrations keep the customers you have, and they help those customers win deals of their own, which sends more activity back through your platform.

Your customers' end users get a better experience

End users expect their software to work together. A finance team on your accounting platform assumes it will connect to the other tools they run every day, from spend management to tax compliance. When those connections aren't there, the work falls back to manual data entry, and that friction eventually turns into a reason to evaluate someone else.

The same holds well beyond accounting. An HRIS platform or an applicant tracking system sits in exactly the same web of connected tools its users depend on. A unified API provider closes that gap at scale, linking your platform to the wider ecosystem of B2B software your customers already work in.

Your ecosystem partners can move faster

The companies building on your platform, through your marketplace or your developer program, gain from this too. They face the same integration problem from the other side: they need to connect to many platforms across a category, and building each connector by hand is slow and expensive.

When your platform is reachable through a unified API, those partners get to your customers sooner. The barrier to joining your ecosystem drops, which means more applications in your marketplace and a richer set of options for the customers you already have.

How the data flows

The question we hear most from platform partnership teams is some version of this: how does the data move, and are you storing our customers' data?

No, we don't store it. Apideck runs a real-time passthrough architecture. When one of our customers makes an API call, we route that request to your platform's API as it happens. Your platform processes it and returns the response. We normalize that response into a standard format and pass it back to our customer. Nothing is stored or cached along the way.

Your platform stays the single source of truth and the data is always live, with no sync-and-cache layer in between to introduce staleness or data residency questions.

A few related details tend to matter to platform teams. Authentication runs through Apideck's Vault, which enforces OAuth 2.0 flows that follow your brand guidelines, so your customers see your own authorization screen when they connect. Our infrastructure honors your published rate limits and throttles requests to your specifications, so no surprise traffic spikes land on your API. And every API request is logged for 90 days, which lets developers troubleshoot integration issues themselves instead of routing them to your support team.

Addressing common concerns

A few questions come up in almost every conversation we have with platform partnership teams.

"Won't this undermine our direct partnerships?"

It works the other way around. A unified API provider doesn't replace the partnership between your platform and the companies building on you; it removes the slowest part of that partnership, the technical integration, and leaves more room for everything else.

Every integration partnership has a technical side and a commercial side. The technical side is building and maintaining the connector, handling authentication, normalizing data, and tracking API changes. The commercial side is the marketplace listing, the co-marketing, the co-selling, the support alignment, the work that moves revenue.

Apideck takes the technical side off both your plates. That frees your team and the B2B software company to spend time on the commercial relationship instead of on engineering that has to finish before the partnership can show any results. Go-to-market starts on day one rather than after a quarter of build work.

Partner size doesn't change the logic. A large enterprise vendor gets to point its engineers at core product rather than connector maintenance. A small startup gets to list your platform as a supported integration without standing up and maintaining a connector of its own. Either way the partnership comes out stronger, because the technical barrier is gone and both sides can put their energy into the relationship.

"How is this different from scraping or unofficial access?"

Apideck builds and maintains connectors against your platform's documented API, using OAuth 2.0 authentication and staying inside the terms and guidelines you publish. We don't reverse-engineer private APIs, scrape data out of user interfaces, or rely on credential-sharing workarounds; every connector we run is built to operate the way your platform intends integrations to work.

Where we hold certified partnerships, the connector is formally recognized and reviewed by the platform's own partnership team, and we keep pursuing that level of formal collaboration with more platforms.

"What would working together actually look like?"

What collaboration looks like depends on what suits your platform.

The deepest version is a certified partnership. Apideck goes through your partner program and meets your technical and compliance requirements to become an officially recognized integration partner. Your team gets full visibility into how the connector behaves, and both sides get the most out of the arrangement. That is how our existing certified partnerships work.

A lighter version is developer program participation. Plenty of platforms run open developer or partner programs with documented requirements and self-serve onboarding, and Apideck joins those on the same terms and to the same standards as anyone else building on your API.

When neither of those is the right starting point, the essentials are enough: API documentation, access credentials, and a sandbox or test environment let us build and maintain a high-quality connector. That kind of access isn't always public, so we will work with your team to set it up in a way that fits your internal policies. It also lets both sides try the relationship with little commitment before deciding whether to formalize it.

Which model fits depends on your own policies and where you are in your integration strategy. We stay flexible because no two platforms arrive with the same needs.

Who already works with Apideck

Apideck holds certified partnerships with some of the most widely used platforms in B2B software: Intuit (QuickBooks), Workday (where we are a Silver Partner), Sage Intacct, Sage Business Cloud Accounting, SAP, and HubSpot. Each of them ran its own evaluation and decided that working with Apideck was good for its ecosystem.

Beyond those certified partnerships, Apideck maintains more than 200 connectors across seven categories, and our customers include over 200 B2B SaaS and fintech companies, from early-stage startups to established enterprise vendors.

On security, we are SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, encrypt data with AES-256, enforce TLS for everything in transit, and run regular third-party penetration tests.

Getting started

If you want to see what working with Apideck could look like, the simplest first step is a conversation. We will show you how our connectors work and which model of collaboration fits your platform best.

There is no long-term commitment attached to that first conversation. It is a chance to talk through how we might help your ecosystem grow.

You can reach our partnership team at partners@apideck.com.