How PolyAPI Quantifies the Hidden Cost of Integration (And Why Your Prospects Need This)

How PolyAPI Quantifies the Hidden Cost of Integration (And Why Your Prospects Need This)

The hardest problems to sell solutions for are the ones that don’t feel like problems. They’re just how things work. The way it’s always been. Background noise that everyone’s learned to tune out.

Integration is one of those problems. Every enterprise has systems that don’t talk to each other. Every engineering team spends time building connectors and maintaining APIs. It’s annoying, sure, but it’s not urgent. Until someone shows you what it’s actually costing.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Darko Vukovic, CEO and Founder of PolyAPI, shared the framework that transformed integration from “something we should probably fix someday” into “we’re hemorrhaging millions and didn’t even know it.” The insight wasn’t technical—it was about reframing an invisible tax as a visible crisis.

The Problem Nobody Measures

Here’s the challenge Darko faced: everyone knows integration is tedious. Developers complain about it. Engineering managers wish it was easier. But nobody treats it as urgent because nobody’s measuring what it actually costs.

“Companies spend 30 to 40% of their engineering time doing integrations,” Darko explains. Let that number settle for a moment. Not 5%. Not 10%. Between 30 and 40 percent of every engineering hour goes to connecting systems rather than building products.

But it gets worse when you translate that percentage into actual resources. “That means if you have 100 engineers, you have 30 to 40 engineers that are just doing integration work.” Suddenly this isn’t an abstract efficiency problem—it’s 40 full-time employees whose entire job is plumbing.

Think about what that means for a typical tech company. If your average fully-loaded engineering cost is $200,000 per year, and you have 100 engineers, you’re spending $6-8 million annually just on integration work. That’s not a line item on anyone’s budget. It’s not tracked in any dashboard. But it’s real money being spent on undifferentiated heavy lifting instead of shipping features that customers actually care about.

Why the Tax Stays Hidden

The reason this cost remains invisible is that it doesn’t show up as a discrete expense. Nobody writes a check for “integration tax.” Instead, it manifests as:

The project that took six weeks instead of two because three of those weeks were spent connecting to Salesforce. The engineer who joined to build the new product feature but spent half their first quarter writing API connectors. The sprint planning meeting where a quarter of the backlog is maintenance work for existing integrations. The feature that got deprioritized because the team was underwater with integration projects.

These costs are diffused across every engineering team, every sprint, every project. They’re the reason projects take longer than estimated. They’re why engineering velocity isn’t what it should be. But because the cost is spread across hundreds of small inefficiencies rather than one large expense, it never triggers alarm bells.

Darko’s insight was recognizing that this diffusion was precisely what made the problem sellable. If he could aggregate all those small inefficiencies and show executives what they actually added up to, the problem would become impossible to ignore.

The Reframing That Changes Everything

The genius of Darko’s framework is how it translates abstract inefficiency into concrete resource allocation. “30 to 40 engineers just doing integration work” is a statement that bypasses all technical jargon and lands immediately with any executive who’s ever looked at an org chart.

Because here’s what that statement really means: you hired 100 people to build your product. But 40 of them aren’t building your product—they’re building scaffolding. You’re paying Silicon Valley engineering salaries for work that generates zero competitive advantage. Your competitors have the exact same integrations. Your customers don’t care about them. But you’re spending millions on them anyway.

This reframing transforms the entire conversation. Instead of selling API management as a nice-to-have efficiency improvement, PolyAPI becomes the solution to reclaiming 40% of your engineering capacity. The value proposition shifts from “we’ll make integration easier” to “we’ll give you back 40 engineers to work on what actually matters.”

The urgency comes from showing executives that they’re already paying for a solution—they just don’t realize it. Those 40 engineers are the cost of not having proper API infrastructure. PolyAPI isn’t asking for new budget—it’s showing how to reallocate budget that’s already being wasted.

Making It Personal and Immediate

The framework works because it’s instantly calculable for any prospect. A VP of Engineering doesn’t need to commission a study or audit their engineering time to know if this applies to them. They can do the math in their head during the sales call.

How many engineers do you have? How many integration projects are in your current sprint? How many engineers are primarily working on connecting systems rather than building features? The answers are uncomfortable and immediate.

This is what Darko means when he talks about companies that are “spending this much money on integration tools” having “a very deep integration problem.” They’ve already acknowledged the pain by paying for solutions. But those solutions haven’t eliminated the engineering tax—they’ve just made it slightly less painful. PolyAPI’s pitch is that you can eliminate the tax entirely by changing the infrastructure.

The Broader Lesson for B2B Founders

What makes Darko’s approach powerful isn’t specific to integration or APIs—it’s a template for selling any infrastructure that solves an invisible problem. The formula has three components:

First, identify the hidden tax. What are your prospects already paying for that doesn’t show up as a line item? Where are they bleeding resources without realizing it? For PolyAPI, it was engineering time. For your company, it might be something else—but every enterprise has hidden taxes they’re not measuring.

Second, quantify it in terms they can’t ignore. Don’t talk about efficiency gains or percentage improvements. Talk about full-time equivalents. Talk about millions of dollars. Talk about concrete resources that could be redeployed. Make the invisible visible by attaching real numbers to abstract problems.

Third, show them they’re already paying for it. The hardest part of enterprise sales is getting budget approved. But if you can show that the prospect is already spending money on the problem—just inefficiently—you’re not asking for new budget. You’re showing them how to stop wasting money they’re already spending.

Why This Works in Complex Sales

The engineering tax framework is particularly effective because it bypasses all the typical objections that kill enterprise deals. You don’t need to convince anyone they have an integration problem—they know they do. You don’t need to justify ROI calculations—the cost is already there. You don’t need to compete with ten other vendors on feature comparison—you’re competing with the status quo, and the status quo is provably expensive.

This is the kind of problem quantification that gets executives to actually care about infrastructure decisions. Because infrastructure is boring until someone shows you what not having it is costing. Then it becomes the most important thing to fix.

Darko built PolyAPI’s entire go-to-market strategy around making the invisible visible. He took a problem everyone knew existed but nobody treated as urgent, and he showed them the multi-million dollar tax they were paying to ignore it. That’s not just good sales messaging—it’s the difference between selling efficiency improvements and selling the recovery of resources your prospects didn’t know they’d lost.