Engineered integrations vs Zapier: when to use which

Zapier isn't bad. It's misused.

Use Zapier when:

• Volume is under ~5,000 events/day
• Latency tolerance is minutes, not seconds
• The flow is unidirectional
• A single field-mapping covers the use case
• You can tolerate occasional silent drops

Use engineered integration code when:

• Any of the above is false
• The integration touches money (Stripe, billing, payments)
• The integration touches PII or compliance-sensitive data
• The use case requires idempotency or replay
• You need an audit trail

Most mid-market SaaS stacks use Zapier where they should be using engineered code. The fix is usually 1–3 services rewritten in TypeScript with retries, dead-letter queues, and monitoring.