Integrations as Standard Infrastructure
Zachary Kirby, co-founder of Vessel, on building the Vercel for integrations
This is a wedge into a much larger software budget, because the real pitch is not selling one more connector, it is taking over part of a product team’s ongoing maintenance burden. Most SaaS companies need Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk integrations to close deals, but those integrations are not their product. Once a few engineers spend a meaningful share of each week fixing auth, rate limits, field mappings, and API breakage, outsourcing starts to look like buying cloud instead of running servers.
-
The shift is from build versus buy to which vendor to buy from. In the Vessel interview, in house builds were already becoming less appealing as customers demanded deeper customer facing integrations, and founders increasingly treated integrations the way teams now treat auth or hosting infrastructure.
-
The alternative is not just headcount savings, it is better product UX. Workflow tools like Zapier and Workato were built for internal automations and no code users, while native integration vendors are trying to keep setup inside the SaaS product so customers do not get pushed out to a third party flow builder during onboarding.
-
This creates a broader market than vertical universal APIs like Plaid or Recall.ai. Those companies unlock hard to access data and charge for a specialized pipe. Vessel is often replacing work a SaaS company already does, which means it can sell to any product team where integrations are necessary, frequent, and distracting from the core roadmap.
The next stage is that customer facing integrations become standard infrastructure, and vendors win by combining speed with enough depth to handle edge cases. As more SaaS products compete on how well they fit into Salesforce, HubSpot, and other systems of record, the companies that abstract the maintenance work without forcing a generic user experience will keep pulling integration work out of in house teams.