Every product or partnerships team feels the pressure of more. More customer requests. More tech partner asks. More roadmap items that compete with bugs, onboarding, and core product stability.
Somewhere in the middle of that tension sits the quiet, relentless expectation to deliver more integrations, faster, with fewer resources than ever.
Most teams try to keep up the same way. Hire another engineer. Buy an iPaaS. Experiment with AI-assisted code. Ship a handful more integrations. Then another handful. But the story is always the same. The volume outpaces the resources, tech debt compounds, and expectations rise even faster.
Let’s take a step back and look at what is really going on.
What we are actually talking about when we talk about integrations
At its simplest, a SaaS integration connects two platforms so the customer does not have to manually copy data between them. It lets workflows move automatically. It reduces friction. It allows customers to combine the tools they already use.
This is not a new idea. What has changed is the scale, the expectations, and the number of tools customers now run their businesses on.
A decade ago, a product could get away with a handful of strong integrations.
Today it is the opposite. Customers assume every tool they rely on should connect to yours. If it does not, it can be a reason they move to a competitor that already offers it.
That expectation gap is widening.
The hidden math behind “how many integrations do we actually need”
Here is the trap most teams fall into. You talk to your sales and CS teams. You collect the top requested integrations. You estimate it out. Maybe it is fifty. Maybe one hundred. You prioritize. It feels manageable.
Then reality hits.
Last year, we sat down with the senior product manager of a large data company that followed this exact pattern. He told us that they scoped out what they thought would be the full list, thinking it would be about 100 integrations. When they dug in, the real number was in the 1000s.
Not because they had thousands of high volume partners. But because even the most niche integration might be mission critical for a handful of customers.
Three customers might need Integration A.
Five customers might need Integration B.
Ten customers might need twenty different long tail integrations.
The math stacks up fast, and suddenly your team is drowning in edge cases.
That is the real story behind modern SaaS integrations. The long tail is bigger than anyone expects.
How teams try to solve it
There are only a few approaches most product teams take.
Build it manually.
This is the default. Your engineers write the logic, test each connection, maintain it every time something changes, and support customer issues. It is high control but slow and expensive.
Lean on AI to build integrations faster.
AI can help write code and generate scaffolding, but it does not eliminate maintenance. You still own the testing, the security, the ongoing updates, and the tech debt. Build times can be shorter, but the work does not disappear.
Use an iPaaS.
iPaaS tools can speed up delivery, but they come with constraints. You still create and maintain each integration one by one. You inherit the limits of the provider’s data models. And you often end up with brittle workflows that break as customers scale or use data differently than expected.
These responses all help, but they do not solve the root problem, which is scale. You cannot hire your way out. You cannot template your way out. You cannot automate your way out.
The number of integrations customers want will always be larger than the number your team can build and support.
The shift to open platforms
The companies that get ahead of this are the ones that open up their platform. They give developers, partners, and even power users a clear path to build the integrations they want. They stop treating integrations as a one way factory line run by the product team. They treat it like an ecosystem.
But opening your APIs is not enough. Most teams do the bare minimum. They publish endpoints and a few examples and call it a platform. That is not a platform. It is a documentation page.
If you want outside developers to build on your APIs, you need structure around it. Guided workflows. A place to submit builds. Clear requirements. Versioning. Testing. A feedback loop with your team. And most importantly, a place to showcase the integrations so customers can install them and trust them.
This is where a developer portal becomes essential. It operationalizes the entire process. It turns outside builders into an extension of your product strategy instead of a support burden.
And when you connect that portal directly to your partner marketplace, you get something even more valuable: A scalable way to grow your integration ecosystem without owning every single integration yourself.
How Partner Fleet solves this
Partner Fleet gives you the full system from end to end. A developer portal that helps external builders follow a consistent workflow. A marketplace that houses every listing. A clean way to approve, review, and publish what gets built. And a unified experience for customers, whether they browse your integrations on your website or inside your product.
Instead of building and maintaining hundreds of SaaS integrations, you can create a path for partners and developers to do it at scale. You get more integrations, faster, without multiplying your engineering load. And you get a platform that grows with you instead of adding more tech debt.
If you want to move from reactive integration building to a true ecosystem model, this is the way forward. Book a demo to learn more.
