> Zapier is doing something complex? So asks a commenter on the Internet.

Essentially, you are implying that enabling no-code integration with thousands of 3rd party services is easy.

Classic case of: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

I can tell you from first hand experience that it is extremely difficult to ensure consistent, reliable ETL of JSON payloads between thousands of services.

APIs are unreliable. Schemas change with no warning. Data you expect might be missing and data you don’t expect might show up. You would be surprised how often things don’t work as you’d expect them to.

Holyshit, that actually sounds more involved than I thought. It dawned to me that that's why there exists API versions (v1, v2, etc).

Zapier sounds like theyre maintaining these integrations so that they are tested and they work? That alone is a lot of work.

Zapier does have thousands of integrations, and some hundreds of them (the oldest or most widely used) are maintained internally for the best user experience.

These days though, many more are maintained by the API providers themselves, since it benefits them to provide a no-code solution for their users to link their API to thousands of others - a service provider can only build and maintain so many direct integrations themselves. https://zapier.com/platform

I have always thought it would be useful if API providers were able to provide the javascript bundle that Zapier runs under the hood on the dev platform alongside their API at a pre-defined route, so any runner (Zapier, Tray, MS Flow/Power Automate) could consume the API regardless of location (SaaS automation, desktop client, etc). I believe there's even an automation provider that allows you to "one-click" import the integration you've built from Zapier to their platform (the name escapes me at the moment, my apologies).

If the API provider is already maintaining the integration, it's a matter of automation providers moving towards a standard for how to express integrations as the ecosystem matures.

I still can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

Have you ever tried to marry two APIs? It’s almost never as simple as it should be. And Zapier isn’t just two, it’s hundreds.

Zapier is just an engine that runs templated code(tasks) that have inputs and outputs. They do have q bazillion integrations thats were the value is.