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Launch HN: Nango (YC W23) – Source-available unified API

190 pointsby rguldenerabout 1 year ago
Hey everyone, we are Bastien and Robin from Nango (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nango.dev">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nango.dev</a>). We take care of the annoyances of external APIs (167 and counting) so you can quickly build custom integrations for your SaaS, while retaining full control over how they work. 2 min demo video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;d04c67b47e284e86b91b4b99fba548ec" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;d04c67b47e284e86b91b4b99fba548ec</a><p>SaaS engineering teams face a tough choice: they can build each integration in-house from scratch, which gives them full control but takes a lot of time and maintenance effort. Or they can use pre-built solutions, which are fast and easy but less flexible and might not fulfill all customer needs.<p>Nango combines the best of both worlds. We let you quickly ship custom integrations without building complex infrastructure or diving deep into the quirks of each API. You control the business logic, data models, and customer-specific configurations, like custom field mappings. We handle (O)Auth and run your integrations reliably in production.<p>Under the hood, your integrations run as typescript “lambdas” on Nango. A typical integration has 3-5 lambdas of 20-50 lines of code each. These lambdas live inside your git repo, are version-controlled with the rest of your app, and get deployed to Nango with a CLI (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nango.dev&#x2F;understand&#x2F;core-concepts">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nango.dev&#x2F;understand&#x2F;core-concepts</a>).<p>Our runtime has a built-in scheduler for continuous background syncs, monitoring to know if your integrations run as expected, detailed logging of everything that happens in Nango, and pre-built infrastructure to deal with (O)auth, retries, rate-limit handling, webhook floods, data caching, de-duplication, etc. More here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nango.dev&#x2F;understand&#x2F;architecture">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nango.dev&#x2F;understand&#x2F;architecture</a><p>We have found that ChatGPT and Copilot let you build integrations on Nango very fast without having to learn each API’s intricacies. LLMs are great at figuring out which endpoint to use, what parameters it takes, etc. Paired with our runtime, this lets you build complex, high-scale integrations in hours instead of weeks.<p>We’ve put a ton of effort into dealing with API complexities, so you don’t have to. Even integrations that looked simple at first ended up forcing us to extend our infra to deal with their quirks and gotchas.<p>For example, we had to figure out 100+ different OAuth implementations (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nango.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;why-is-oauth-still-hard">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nango.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;why-is-oauth-still-hard</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35713518">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35713518</a>). We had to deal with a half-dozen non-standard auth methods (Github apps, Stripe apps, Netsuite, etc.), expiring webhooks, ways to deal with data dependencies, weird pagination methods, API keys that change with every API call, dozens of different ways to register for webhooks, etc. It’s a constantly moving target, but it is a challenge we have come to love, and we think the approach makes sense: we specialize in finicky details that vary from API to API—you specialize in making your product great and offering more integrations to your users.<p>Last but not least, Nango is open source (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NangoHQ&#x2F;nango">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;NangoHQ&#x2F;nango</a>) under the ELv2 license (allows most use cases, except for direct copy-cats). Anybody can contribute new APIs &amp; share their integration templates with the community.<p>The fastest way to see Nango in action is with our interactive demo here (no signup required): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.nango.dev&#x2F;hn-demo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.nango.dev&#x2F;hn-demo</a><p>Or take a look at our docs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nango.dev">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.nango.dev</a><p>We would love to hear your feedback and look forward to the comments!

32 comments

Trufaabout 1 year ago
This looks very interesting, but I have two questions.<p>1) Did I understand this correctly, oversimplifying, instead of going api.slack.com&#x2F;users I go nango.com&#x2F;slack&#x2F;users<p>If I did it leads to question 2) since I assume this won&#x27;t have feature parity 100% of the times, what&#x27;s my escape hatch when I need a feature that&#x27;s available in an api and not in your service, if worse comes to worse, can I still easily access the original api easily?
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rahimnathwaniabout 1 year ago
I read your entire post, and couldn&#x27;t understand what you do.<p>After watching the video, I <i>think</i> you make it easy for SaaS creators to give their customers the ability to integrate with other SaaS&#x2F;API products. Is that right?<p>So e.g. if I make a SaaS tool for plumbers, and some of those plumbers use Xero for accounting, then I could use Nango to allow those plumbers to set up some data flow between my SaaS and Xero. Right?
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nipabout 1 year ago
Congrats on the launch Bastien and Robin!<p>This launch couldn’t be more timely for us:<p>We’re currently planning on integrating with many oauth-based apps where our end goal is to provide always valid access tokens to end customers (developers), abstracting away the complex refresh mechanism that we take care of.<p>Is it something we could do with Nando?<p>The simplified flow looks as follows:<p>1. Customer logins via oauth in a dedicated portal<p>2. We have a way to retrieve the access token at any time from Nando via an API<p>3. We handover that access token to our user for their own calls to the oauth-authenticated APIs
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lordofmoriaabout 1 year ago
Congrats! We’ve been using Nango for about a year, mostly to handle oauth flows for us to about 7-8 integrations (Dropbox, google drive, etc) that our users can self-service connect in our app.<p>Very stable, the team is respnsibe to handling the weird corner cases (which their value prop is all about), and they seem to be able to build new integrations and functionality quickly.<p>I’ll be taking a closer look at their sync functionality, since our users want email in app (CRM style).
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toomuchtodoabout 1 year ago
Do you leverage Gorilla (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;</a>) at all? If not, perhaps consider if it would solve some pain for you.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36073241">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36073241</a>
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baetylusabout 1 year ago
Love this idea - a huge pain point for many teams. I&#x27;ve had this issue, and am looking forward to trying this out.<p>I know there are a couple competitors too. How do you distinguish yourself from something like Merge.dev?
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dominicwhyteabout 1 year ago
Nango is awesome. I&#x27;ve used it across several projects and it&#x27;s sped up our &quot;time to live integration&quot; significantly + reduced maintenance costs. Congrats Bastien, Robin and team!
alertifyabout 1 year ago
At <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bot9.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bot9.ai</a> (most advanced AI based Customer service engine) we are currently building integrations for CRMs, Ticketing tools, Chat softwares, Ecommerce platforms etc which the bot connects to.<p>For example the bot connects to freshdesk or intercom and handles the tickets &#x2F; chats just like a normal agent, and handsover to a human if it can&#x27;t solve or a customer asks, without the company having to change their chat or ticket tools.<p>Or connects to shopify to help customers answer any pre-sales questions or help them make a purchase decision.<p>I see the pain in building these integration one by one and currently exploring a few SaaS that will help me have lot more integrations without us having to build &amp; test one by one (Months).<p>Paragon , hotglue for example.<p>There are generally two approaches to do this, each with their pros and cons.<p>A few go with a unified api approach. The benefit is that you can integrate one Unified CRM API and then use all CRM softwares directly. While this does give a lot of headstart, the downside is that all CRM or ticket softwars may not have the same terminology and you may get into problems.<p>For example, intercom does not really have a ticket type system but still people use it for ticketing. Whlie freshdesk or Zendesk is a proper ticket system with lots of variables that can be mapped to a ticket. With a unified API you kind of lose out on max potential of the platform you are integrating with, at the cost of faster integration.<p>Then there are direct APIs which still allow faster integration by handling auth, logging, debugging and some kind of unification but you have to still integrate them one by one in your SaaS. So you gain lot more control, at the expense of time to implement.<p>By looking at the docs, I see they are trying to go with a hybrid model where they give a direct integration option but i can map the models myself which kind of covers both cases ? Someone from the team can comment. But Interesting.<p>This is definitely an interesting space which has been mostly covered by zapier. but zaps are ugly, a glue and very expensive for anything serios and mostly used by individuals who just want to connect a few systems together.<p>In this AI era where everyone is building something with AI and finding out that building the MVP is pretty easy but then gets stuck on expanding because customers wants things to work inside the tools they already use, there is definitely a market for this.<p>I have sent a meeting request, happy to connect and see if this helps us.
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xgb84jabout 1 year ago
One challenge I encountered in the past was syncing data between a SaaS software I built and customers&#x27; ERP systems. Building these integrations was an absolute pain because there often is no publicly available documentation. This means you need to pay an SAP consultant 300 dollars per hour to tell you all the things normal apis have in their public documentation. Is this something you plan to address? Or are you just making already usable apis even easier to use?<p>Btw great product! Just really curious about a personal pain point of mine!
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ultrasaurusabout 1 year ago
I love giving users a library of lambdas. We did something similar almost a decade ago at PagerDuty, we&#x27;ll map the fields &amp; headers for you and provide examples, but you can munge up the json however you want: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagerduty.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;custom-event-transformer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pagerduty.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;custom-event-transform...</a>
brapabout 1 year ago
I spent about 5 minutes (incl watching the demo) and I still don’t quite understand what this does.<p>I’m probably not in your target audience, so maybe the issue is with me. But I think you should consider clarifying the use-case and value a bit.<p>It’s one of those things that should probably be immediately obvious to anyone working on SaaS. I was curious so I spent some time on it, potential customers may not be as forgiving and might give you just 10-20 seconds.
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callmeedabout 1 year ago
It&#x27;s interesting, seems like a popular space lately (even within YC). Off the top of my head, there&#x27;s merge.dev, Terra, Kombo, Workato.<p>Aside from the obvious question of &quot;how are you different&#x2F;better?&quot; I&#x27;m most curious to know why you&#x27;re going so broad initially. You&#x27;ve got everything from legal to devtools to gaming. Seems like the opposite of a wedge&#x2F;beachhead approach. Why?
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nextworddevabout 1 year ago
This is really great work, I will try it out. How do I reach out if I have questions?
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lpellisabout 1 year ago
I&#x27;m struggling a bit to figure out the pricing here. If I have lets say 50 users that sync Trello, does that count as 50 synced connections?
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sqsabout 1 year ago
Very cool idea! I got rejected from Y Combinator in 2006 for a similar idea. Still surprised nobody has done this. Congrats on the launch!
harrylucasabout 1 year ago
Wanted to check if this actually provides a unified api? E.g. each category of integration will return the exact same data shape? From the looks of the video I&#x27;m still making a call to slack&#x27;s API `users.list` and have to write the code to paginate slacks api (e.g. the next cursor).
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rumadabout 1 year ago
Good luck with the launch! Looks awesome. I will take a deep look into integrations to use on my SaaS.
mnafeesabout 1 year ago
Congratulations on the launch! I am interested to know the choice of runtime (in this case - TypeScript) for the implementation of the integrations. What are some reasons that a systems language such as Go was not chosen?
digitcatphdabout 1 year ago
This is going to be crucial infrastructure for the next generation of LLM applications
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angryasianabout 1 year ago
I&#x27;m a little confused. Doesn&#x27;t the user still have to sign into each oauth service individually still ?<p>1. So is this managing tokens ?<p>2. These templates are used instead of api&#x27;s ?
exolababout 1 year ago
How does the &quot;scale plan&quot; work and how much is it?
azubyabout 1 year ago
Nango has been a pleasure for us to work with. We&#x27;re not affiliated in any way, we&#x27;re just a happy customer and highly recommend it.
prakhar897about 1 year ago
Quite similar to make.com and similar products right? Any differentiators from them?
sgammonabout 1 year ago
Congrats on the launch! This is such an important space for disruption.
dugganabout 1 year ago
Love the source available API proxy, that’s a useful component on its own! A little disappointed to see that most of the really good stuff is not available for self-hosting, but an IPaaS&#x2F;Unified API is a not the kind of project one tinkers away at on the weekends for the joy of it. It’s hard work, deserves congratulations, and bills gotta get paid.<p>I remain ever hopeful for an open source IPaaS some day (had a chat with my cofounders about it this morning actually) but I just don’t see the incentives aligning. 1.) It’s hard to do, 2.) I don’t see a megacorp sponsoring a CNCF project, 3.) some amount of the work is in mapping concepts to your own platform, 4.) there is a gauntlet of legal agreements, branding guidelines, security reviews, etc., to go through with third parties regardless.<p>All that said, I&#x27;ll be taking a closer look at Nango, because this is an evergreen problem, and I&#x27;m interested in finding the best solution.
icyabout 1 year ago
Obligatory mention of ELv2 <i>not</i> being open source (not OSI approved!).
JonAtkinsonabout 1 year ago
This is not open source.
rokgregoricabout 1 year ago
Congrats
mdanielabout 1 year ago
&gt; open source ... under the ELv2 license<p>I would think a Launch HN would know better than to use &quot;open source&quot; with a non open source license. It is source available, sure, and it&#x27;s your software so you can license it as you wish, but don&#x27;t call it open source as that continues to pollute the very idea of the software freedoms that actual open source licenses are designed to provide
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infrawhispersabout 1 year ago
ELv2 is not an open source license. Why are so many companies using “open source” to scaffold on traction and interest? This framing is disingenuous.
frozenmaestroabout 1 year ago
Good work! But ELv2 != open source. Clickbait destroys trust.
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muttanttabout 1 year ago
This is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud-elements.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud-elements.com&#x2F;</a> all over again