Integration is easy in the demo and hard in production
Calling an API once in a tutorial is simple. Running an integration in production is where the work is: the service goes down, rate-limits you, times out, changes its response, or double-charges if you retry carelessly. A robust integration is defined by how it behaves when the other side misbehaves.
We build integrations that expect failure. That means retries that do not create duplicates, graceful handling when a service is unavailable, and clear logging so that when something does go wrong, you can see exactly what happened.
- Retry logic with idempotency so a retry never charges or creates twice
- Timeout and fallback handling for when a service is slow or down
- Rate-limit awareness so you stay within the provider's quotas
- Webhook handling verified for authenticity and safe against replay
- Secure storage of API keys and secrets, never hard-coded in the app
- Logging and alerting so failed calls surface instead of disappearing
Common integrations we build
Most products stand on a handful of external services. We integrate the common ones cleanly and wrap them so a provider change later does not ripple through your whole codebase.
We also handle the messy cases: legacy SOAP endpoints, poorly documented APIs, and services that need data reshaped before they will accept it. Where a provider offers a stable SDK we use it; where they do not, we build a thin, well-tested layer of our own.
- Payments: Stripe, PayPal, and similar processors
- CRMs and marketing tools: Salesforce, HubSpot, and others
- Communication: email, SMS, and push via services like Twilio and SendGrid
- Shipping, tax, mapping, and other operational providers
- Data sync between your app and external systems, one-way or two-way
- An internal abstraction layer so swapping a provider later is contained
More on software development
Frequently asked questions
The API we need to use has terrible documentation. Can you still integrate it?
Usually, yes. Part of integration work is figuring out how a poorly documented or inconsistent API actually behaves, then building a reliable layer on top of it and testing that layer thoroughly. We have handled legacy and undocumented endpoints; it takes more investigation, but it is workable.
What happens when the third-party service goes down?
That is exactly what we design for. Depending on the service, that can mean queuing the work to retry later, failing gracefully with a clear message, or falling back to an alternative. We also add monitoring so you know a provider is having problems before your users start reporting them.
Will an integration break when the provider updates their API?
Providers do change and deprecate APIs, so we build to reduce the blast radius: pinning to versioned endpoints where offered, isolating provider-specific code behind an internal layer, and monitoring for failures. It cannot be made impossible, but it can be contained so a change is a small fix, not a rebuild.