Launch HN: Nango (YC W23) – Source-available unified API
Hey everyone, we are Bastien and Robin from Nango (https://www.nango.dev). 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: https://www.loom.com/share/d04c67b47e284e86b91b4b99fba548ec

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.

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.

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 (https://docs.nango.dev/understand/core-concepts).

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: https://docs.nango.dev/understand/architecture

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.

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.

For example, we had to figure out 100+ different OAuth implementations (see https://www.nango.dev/blog/why-is-oauth-still-hard and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713518). 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.

Last but not least, Nango is open source (https://github.com/NangoHQ/nango) under the ELv2 license (allows most use cases, except for direct copy-cats). Anybody can contribute new APIs & share their integration templates with the community.

The fastest way to see Nango in action is with our interactive demo here (no signup required): https://app.nango.dev/hn-demo

Or take a look at our docs: https://docs.nango.dev

We would love to hear your feedback and look forward to the comments!