The Hidden Cost of iPaaS: Why We Built AlgorithmShift

In 2023, I watched a company I was advising spend $340,000 and 18 months trying to migrate away from Salesforce. Not because Salesforce was bad—it was fine. But their business had evolved, their needs had changed, and they were trapped. Every integration, every automation, every workflow they'd built over five years was locked into the Salesforce ecosystem.

The migration wasn't about moving data. That part was relatively straightforward. The real cost was rebuilding every single integration they'd created through their iPaaS provider. Hundreds of workflows. Thousands of automation rules. All of it proprietary. All of it trapped.

The $340K Lesson

That experience haunted me. Here was a successful, well-funded company with smart engineers, and they were essentially held hostage by their own automation infrastructure. The integrations they'd built weren't assets—they were liabilities. They didn't own any of it.

The integrations we'd built over five years weren't assets—they were liabilities. We didn't own any of it.

I started looking at the numbers more carefully. The iPaaS subscription was $2,400/month. Sounds reasonable, right? But then you add the per-transaction costs. At their scale—about 50,000 operations per day—they were paying an additional $8,000/month just in transaction fees. That's $124,800 per year. For integrations. That they didn't even own.

How We Got Here

The iPaaS model made sense when it was invented. Back in the 2010s, building integrations was genuinely hard. You needed deep expertise in each API, careful error handling, and robust infrastructure. Platforms like Zapier and Workato democratized integrations, making them accessible to non-developers.

But the world has changed. APIs have standardized around REST and GraphQL. Documentation has improved dramatically. AI can now generate working integration code in seconds. The original value proposition of iPaaS—abstraction over complexity—has been eroded by industry progress.

Yet the pricing models haven't changed. You're still paying per-transaction for code that runs on someone else's servers. You're still locked into proprietary workflow languages. You're still paying the integration tax.

The Real Costs of iPaaS

Let's break down what you're actually paying for when you use a traditional iPaaS:

The Per-Transaction Trap

Most iPaaS providers charge based on 'tasks' or 'operations.' Sounds fair—you pay for what you use. But this model has a perverse incentive: the more successful your business becomes, the more you pay for the same integrations.

• Startup stage (1,000 tasks/month): $50/month
• Growth stage (50,000 tasks/month): $500/month
• Scale stage (500,000 tasks/month): $2,000+/month
• Enterprise (5M+ tasks/month): $10,000+/month

That same Stripe → Slack notification that cost you $0.001 when you had 100 customers now costs you the same per transaction when you have 100,000 customers. The integration didn't get more complex. Your success is being taxed.

Vendor Dependency

Every workflow you build in an iPaaS is written in that platform's proprietary language. Want to move to a competitor? You're starting from scratch. Want to run the integration in your own infrastructure? Not possible. Want to customize the error handling beyond what the UI allows? Too bad.

The AlgorithmShift Approach

After that $340K lesson, I became obsessed with a simple question: What if your integrations were just... code? Code that you own. Code that runs in your infrastructure. Code that you can read, modify, and take with you.

That's what we built with AlgorithmShift. You use our visual builder to configure your integrations—same ease of use as any iPaaS. But when you click 'export,' you get clean, documented, production-ready code. TypeScript, Python, whatever you prefer.

// This code is yours. Forever.
import { StripeClient } from './integrations/stripe';
import { SlackClient } from './integrations/slack';

export async function handlePaymentSuccess(event: StripeEvent) {
  const payment = event.data.object;

  await slack.postMessage({
    channel: '#payments',
    text: `New payment: $${payment.amount / 100} from ${payment.customer_email}`
  });

  // Add your own logic here
  // No transaction fees. No limits. It's your code.
}

No per-transaction fees. No vendor lock-in. No mystery about what's happening under the hood. Just code that you own, running in your infrastructure, forever.

Calculating Your True Costs

If you're currently using an iPaaS, I challenge you to calculate your true total cost of ownership:

• Monthly subscription fee
• Per-transaction/task costs at current volume
• Projected costs at 10x your current volume
• Hours spent working around platform limitations
• Estimated migration cost if you needed to leave

For most companies, the number is shocking. We've talked to teams paying $50,000+ per year for integrations that could be replaced with a few hundred lines of well-written code.

The integration tax is real. But you don't have to keep paying it.