In 20 years of building software, we’ve seen a common theme. No matter the product, your customers end up needing to connect your app to third-party APIs. You might build real-time notifications with messaging apps, export customer data to databases or spreadsheets, ingest data from CRMs, or connect to any of the thousands of APIs and SaaS services your customers are using. These features are often tied to large contracts and Enterprise customers.
But it’s hard to justify the engineering effort required for these integrations. They’re a distraction from the core product. Once built, they’re hard to maintain. You have to securely manage auth, learn the nuances of the API, and improve the integration as the third-party adds new features your customer wants to use in your app. And they’re a huge context switch for any engineer. Most teams have trouble scaling this.
At Pipedream, our customers tell us a variant of this story every day. We’ve built an early version of a product to solve this: Pipedream Connect. Pipedream Connect supports 2,000+ APIs and provides three core features that we see teams spend the most time building in-house:
- Managed auth: Handle OAuth authorization with a single SDK call, and use your users' resulting access tokens to make authenticated API requests on their behalf. We manage the OAuth refresh process for you, so you can retrieve valid tokens at any time via API.
- Helper functions for APIs: You can use Pipedream's TypeScript libraries of helper functions for 2,000+ APIs to simplify common operations. List Slack channels, Google Sheets, Salesforce accounts, and more, all with a single API call. Since you have access to fresh tokens for these APIs, you also don’t need to use our libraries — you can use any API client or custom code.
- Serverless workflows for your users: Most developers need to run synchronous or async jobs that talk to third-party APIs. Pipedream provides a platform for building and running these jobs as serverless workflows. Workflows are sequences of steps that can use pre-built actions for any API or run any custom code. Pipedream also manages the infrastructure for you: you can use queues, key-value stores, VPCs, and more, all with a single line of config. Once you've built a workflow, you can invoke it for any user. Workflows run with the user's credentials and config, or you can configure static values where relevant.
If this problem resonates, we’d love to hear from you at https://pipedream.com/connect or provide questions and comments here.
