Why Building Native Integrations In-House Is Slowing Your Product Down

Most SaaS companies eventually hit the same wall: Customers want integrations—CRMs, HR platforms, and accounting systems. Supporting them all seems like the logical next step, so product teams roll up their sleeves and start building native integrations in-house. In the beginning, it feels manageable. But over time, maintaining dozens of connectors, chasing API changes, and handling partner-specific support issues become a full-time job. Instead of shipping features that move the needle, your engineers get buried in integration maintenance hell.

Customer expectations often change faster than you complete sprints, so the decision to build every integration in-house can greatly slow down product momentum. Every hour spent reverse-engineering an API spec is an hour not spent on your core product roadmap.

This article throws light on the hidden cost of in-house native integrations and why this outdated strategy is holding your product back. You will learn how unified APIs, like Apideck's, offer a faster, more scalable alternative by compiling dozens of APIs into a single consistent interface. The article breaks down the technical and strategic advantages of using a unified API and shows how modern platforms use this approach to accelerate roadmap delivery, reduce overhead, and free up engineering to focus on what really matters.

Native Integrations Are the Silent Bottleneck in SaaS Development

Building native integrations internally might seem like a natural extension of product development. After all, who knows your platform better than your own engineers? But the reality is that integration development and maintenance quickly become a persistent bottleneck, especially once your customer base starts asking for dozens of systems to "just work" out of the box.

Each new integration starts a multiphase lifecycle: API research, authentication logic, request formatting, data mapping, testing edge cases, partner certification (in some cases), and ongoing monitoring when deployed. Multiply that by every system your customers care about: QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, Zoho Books, Sage Business Cloud Accounting, and so on. Then, you start to see the iceberg below the surface. Development is just the beginning. API versioning, breaking changes, and new customer edge cases turn integration maintenance into an ever-expanding treadmill.

For your engineering team, this means duplicated effort across similar integrations, constant context switching, and fighting bugs triggered by changes in third-party APIs. And when engineers are pulled into yet another connector issue, core product development grinds to a halt.

Why Native Integrations Don't Scale

Building a handful of integrations might be manageable, but as your customer base grows, so do their expectations and their tech stacks. What started with a few "must-have" connected platforms quickly snowballs into an ever-growing backlog of integration requests. Each new integration adds more authentication schemes and more support complexity. The more you say yes, the heavier the maintenance burden becomes.

That burden isn't only technical; it touches every part of your organization. Support teams are flooded with integration-related issues that are difficult to triage due to each platform's unique APIs, error formats, and frequent changes, which require deep, specialized knowledge and careful logging on the developer's part. Product managers lose momentum in reprioritizing integration fixes instead of focusing on core features. Compliance and security teams are pulled in to vet every new connection. Even documentation becomes a moving target. The more integrations you add, the more coordination and upkeep they demand across your entire organization.

Meanwhile, the biggest cost is opportunity. Every engineer writing sync logic or debugging webhook failures is not working on your product's unique value proposition. That's the hidden trap: Integrations appear as features, but they rarely differentiate you in the market. At best, they're a checkbox. At worst, they're a distraction that delays innovation. The more you invest in building native integrations in-house, the less agile your product becomes.

The Case for a Unified API

A unified API makes integrations scalable and reliable by design. Instead of writing and maintaining one-off connectors for every third-party platform, your product integrates once, with a single normalized API layer, and gains access to a broad ecosystem of providers through that abstraction.

The benefits are immediate and many. Firstly, you dramatically reduce the engineering surface area. Instead of building custom authentication, rate limit handling, and error recovery for every new CRM or accounting system that you want to integrate with, your team works with a consistent interface and data model.

Secondly, you onboard new platform integrations much faster, often with no code changes required. This makes it easier to respond to customer demands without kicking off a full dev cycle every time a new integration request lands in your inbox.

Unified APIs also help you optimize your integration strategy. They centralize versioning, abstract away platform quirks, and insulate your product from breaking changes. The result is faster time to market, less maintenance overhead, and fewer support escalations.

Apideck as the Smarter Alternative

Apideck is a unified API platform built to help SaaS companies escape the integration maintenance trap. With Apideck, you get a single consistent API layer for each category (such as CRM, accounting, HRIS, file storage, and more) that connects to dozens of services within that group. Instead of reinventing the wheel for every connector, you build once and instantly support multiple providers with minimal engineering effort.

One of Apideck's standout advantages is its no-data-storage architecture. Data is synced in real time between your platform and third-party services without persisting sensitive customer data on Apideck's servers. This improves compliance and reduces risk without sacrificing performance or visibility. Security-minded teams often appreciate the clear boundaries and the ability to meet customer data residency requirements with ease.

Apideck also offers usage-based billing and broad provider coverage, making it easy to start small and scale as you grow. Want to sync contacts from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM using the same API? Apideck handles the normalization. Need to retrieve invoices from QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Xero without learning three different schemas? One endpoint does the job.

Let's use a quick example to understand the difference that Apideck can make. Suppose you were to fetch a list of customers from two different accounting platforms: Quickbooks and Xero. For Quickbooks, you'll need to perform a full OAuth 2.0 flow with consent and token refresh, store the realmId (company ID), and use Intuit's SQL-like query language to retrieve customer data:

// QuickBooks example
const res = await fetch(
  `https://quickbooks.api.intuit.com/v3/company/${realmId}/query?query=select%20*%20from%20Customer`,
  {
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${accessToken}`,
      Accept: "application/json",
      'Content-Type': 'text/plain'
    }
  }
);
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data.QueryResponse.Customer);

Xero looks different. You'll need to use the xero-tenant-id header, apply filters via query strings, and deal with a different pagination strategy and object model:

// HubSpot example
const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.xero.com/api.xro/2.0/Contacts?where=IsCustomer%3D%3Dtrue",
  {
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${accessToken}`,
      "Xero-tenant-id": tenantId,
      Accept: "application/json"
    }
  }
);
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data.Contacts);

With Apideck's Accounting API, the process is the same for every connected accounting platform. Whether you're pulling data from Quickbooks, Xero, or both at once, you use a single endpoint and a consistent schema:

// Retrieve customers from any connected accounting platform via Apideck
const res = await fetch('https://unify.apideck.com/accounting/customers', {
  headers: {
    'x-apideck-app-id': process.env.APIDECK_APP_ID,
    'x-apideck-consumer-id': 'consumer_123',
    // 'x-apideck-service-id': 'quickbooks', // or 'xero', or any other accounting platform you would like to query data from
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.APIDECK_API_KEY}`
  }
});
const { data } = await res.json();

// Each record includes source service information:
{
  id: 'cust_001',
  name: 'Jane Doe',
  service: 'xero',
  email: 'jane@example.com',
}

You don't need custom OAuth flows per accounting platform, pagination logic rewrites, or manual data mapping. Apideck normalizes fields across platforms and provides metadata so you always know the source. This leaves your team free to focus on building your product's core features.

Real Impact: Faster Time to Market, Lower Maintenance Burden

Let's make this concrete.

Imagine you need to support five popular accounting platforms: Quickbooks, Xero, Freshbooks, Zoho Books, and Sage Business Cloud Accounting. Building each integration in-house can take several weeks—let's assume one to two two-week sprints per integration—depending on API complexity, desired feature coverage, and team size. This doesn't include QA, handling edge cases, or ongoing updates when APIs change. Supporting all five can easily total ten to twenty weeks or more of engineering effort, with an ongoing maintenance burden.

Now, compare that to implementing Apideck's Unified Accounting API. After the initial integration with Apideck's consistent API layer and normalized data model, adding another accounting platform is mostly a configuration change: Apideck already handles authentication differences, field mapping, pagination, and API quirks. Your engineering costs drop from months to weeks or even days, and ongoing maintenance is offloaded entirely.

Here are a few examples of the real-world impact of switching to a unified API:

• WeThrive used Apideck to support multiple HRIS platforms without growing their development team. They saved approximately £35,000–42,000 in integration development costs.
• Praiz, an AI-driven CRM platform, needed to support dozens of CRM systems quickly but had limited developer headcount. Choosing Apideck eliminated the need for two full-time engineers dedicated only to integrations.
• Kikin scaled across verticals while keeping integrations part of the product experience, not the backlog.

Conclusion

Native integrations might feel like a logical in-house investment, but over time, they become blockers to product velocity, scalability, and team focus. What starts as a few strategic connectors often snowballs into an operational burden that eats up engineering bandwidth and delays your roadmap.

Unified APIs, like Apideck, offer a smarter path forward. They remove the grunt work, standardize complexity, and enable your team to deliver integrations faster, with far less overhead. Instead of building from scratch every time, you plug into a single platform that grows with your customers' needs across categories, providers, and use cases.

If your team is still spending weeks shipping the same integration logic over and over again, it's time to ask, "What could we be building instead?"

Ready to stop building integrations and start scaling faster? Explore Apideck's unified API and give your engineering team the freedom to build what matters.