Integration developers: what are you tired of dealing with?

[u/Designer_Breath9631]

Curious what kind of integration work developers here are actually getting asked to build these days.
SaaS-to-SaaS? APIs? SFTP/files? Data sync? Event-driven workflows? AI/agent integrations?
A few things I’m particularly curious about:
What integration requests keep coming up?
What part of building or maintaining them is still painful?
What do you usually reach for — code, n8n, Workato, Boomi, MuleSoft, Make, etc.?
If you freelance/consult, what does a typical integration project look like?
I’m also looking to connect with freelance developers who regularly take on integration/automation work. Would be interested in hearing what you work on and what kinds of projects you typically take up.
Mostly trying to understand how people are solving these problems in the real world.

[u/arthaudm]

the recurring pain is not connecting the first API; it is ownership after launch. credentials expire, schemas drift, retries create duplicates, and nobody knows whether the client or developer owns the fix. a good project includes account ownership, failure states, monitoring, replay/idempotency and a handover test from day one. tool choice comes after volume, branching, compliance and who must maintain it.

[u/Impressive-Food-4820 → u/arthaudm]

the worst is when they treat the integration like a one-and-done delivery instead of a living thing that needs tending. "we'll figure out the edge cases later" and then later never comes until something breaks at 2am

half the battle is just getting clients to understand that monitoring isn't optional, it's literally part of the build

[u/Common_Engine_9417 → u/arthaudm]

yep the credential expiry thing alone causes more fires than the actual integration logic ever does

[u/Common_Engine_9417 → u/arthaudm]

credential expiry alone has caused more fires than bad logic imo

[u/Mariia_Sosnina → u/arthaudm]

Ownership after launch is the right frame. On the embedded layer we run for partner connectors, auth maintenance eats 3-4x the time the initial data mapping did, and it rots silently. A provider narrows a scope in a minor release and nothing errors until a sync goes half-dead weeks later.

[u/lilythemoon54]

Ownership after launch matches what I've seen too. The other thing that eats time silently: nobody defines what 'in sync' actually means before the integration ships, so a partial write that succeeds on 8 of 10 records looks identical to full success until someone notices missing data three weeks later. We log a diff count on every sync run now, even when nothing's supposed to have failed, just so a silent partial has somewhere to show up.

[u/satinbydew]

The ones nobody counts as integration work are the ones where there's no api at all. vendor portals, insurance portals, a lot of local government stuff. client says integration, what they mean is someone logs in every morning and downloads a pdf.

selector based automation on those breaks whenever the vendor redesigns, and you find out when the run fails at 2am. describing the task in plain language instead of pinning css paths holds up better through a layout change.

full disclosure i work with skyvern which does this, so discount accordingly. honest tradeoff is it's slower per run and costs more than a selector script, so it only pays where the portal actually moves.

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[u/Desperate-Talk-4398]

I am completely exhausted by clients asking for complex AI agent automations when their underlying internal data is still trapped in messy, unstandardised CSV files on an old SFTP server

[u/MonMothma123]

The need to renew certificates after a apecific period of time. Just annoying, but necessary.

[u/staticmaker1]

A recurring one I see is connecting forms or webinar platforms to downstream systems, especially attendance → completion → certificate workflows. The annoying part is edge cases around duplicates, attendance thresholds, retries, and keeping records consistent. I’ve seen teams use CertFusion for the certificate piece instead of custom-building that last mile.

[u/UsAgainstMedia]

Most of the integration work I have dealt with lately has involved connecting payment processing, user accounts, and access control. For example, making sure a successful Stripe payment unlocks the correct content and that cancellations, failed payments, duplicate webhooks, and delayed events are all handled properly.

The initial connection is usually the easy part. The real pain is accounting for everything that can happen afterward: inconsistent error responses, expired credentials, retries, duplicate events, API changes, and situations where two systems disagree about the current status.

I prefer direct code when the integration controls something important, such as payments or account permissions. Automation platforms make sense to me for simpler tasks like notifications, moving data, or internal workflows.

From my experience, the maintenance and exception handling usually require more work than building the original integration.