With more than 4 billion daily email users and online scheduling becoming the norm, you probably already realized the need to build a unified email, calendar, and/or contacts experience in your application. In addition to streamlining productivity workflows, building these functionalities can unlock access to 1st party communications data, arming you with insights to create more personalized customer experiences.
While prioritizing these features is clear, deciding whether to build in-house or with an external solution may be a bit fuzzy. Considering available skilled resources, your product strategy, and project total costs, we’ll share why building with Nylas maximizes efficiency.
While having a team of developers capable of creating custom software, or managing and upgrading systems for your business, building and maintaining email, calendar, or contacts integrations is no small feat. Each provider, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, has their own APIs and protocols with their own integration requirements. And every time a change is made to a provider’s APIs, your developers must update and maintain the integration. A lack of clear understanding of each integration requirement will result in additional work and costs beyond what was initially planned and budgeted for.
In fact, we’ve seen many businesses attempt to build on their own, using open source software or APIs from service providers themselves such as the Google Calendar API or Outlook API. Many end up partnering with Nylas because attempting to build themselves has proven to be too complex with many nuances, such as meeting security requirements and scaling infrastructure.
Trying to build the email API ourselves would’ve involved much more time and cost – and we didn’t have the luxury of time. Working with Nylas gave us the confidence to move forward quickly, our speed to market was at minimum two months faster.
Divya Prashanth, CEO and CoFounder of MySocialPulse
A unified API platform like Nylas, simplifies the process of finding resources. With access to a sandbox environment, step-by-step quickstart guides, our library of API documentation, SDKs, and implementation and support teams, Nylas makes it easy for your developers to learn, onboard, and build in no time.
Naturally, you may be concerned about the lack of ownership and quality control when using an external solution. The ability to customize user experiences, brand, and integrations to fit your unique business makes Nylas the best solution for developers. With Nylas, you have options; build a completely customized experience or use out-of-the-box functionality to get to market quicker. For example, build a completely native authentication experience to perfectly match your app, or use Nylas’ hosted authentication for the simplest implementation method where Nylas handles the entire process.
[Nylas] essentially does all we want in a single solution. It’s flexible enough for us to design a user experience tailored to our needs, but also easy enough to leverage out-of-the-box SDKs to start testing demand for these features as quickly as possible.
Sam Leonard-Williams, Head of Product at Acre
When it comes to quality control, ensuring scalability and reliability is integral to successful integration and customer satisfaction. Nylas handles maintenance, updates, and infrastructure management to ensure your integrations remain stable and up to date. And let’s not forget about staying secure and compliant, especially when handling sensitive customer data. Nylas offers the highest level of built-in security and meets compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27011, and CCPA.
Don’t stop at the project costs of building integrations when financially planning. Be sure to factor in total costs building and maintaining integrations, along with tasks often overlooked, such as building authentication and email tracking, or meeting GDPR and other security-related compliance.
Eliminate the need for dedicated integration engineers and accelerate feature releases in less time with fewer resources, all while still having full control of your product. By partnering with Nylas, feel confident in building email, calendar, contacts functionality in your app without having to de-prioritize other features core to your product.
Get started by calculating the true costs of building email, calendar, and contacts integrations.
Discover how product teams can save resources, deploy integrations faster, and improve UX by investing in communications solutions.
Learn how to launch integrations, features, and infrastructure that will wow your customers using a fraction of the resources of in-house builds.
Learn about the common challenges associated with building your own communications integrations and how Nylas can help you avoid them.
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