What is an iPaaS?

An iPaaS — Integration Platform as a Service — is hosted software whose job is connecting other software. You describe how systems should exchange data and when that should happen, and the platform runs it for you: on schedule, on an incoming request, without a server of your own anywhere in the picture.

Flovello is an iPaaS. This page explains what that category actually means, so you can judge whether it's the right shape of tool for the problem in front of you.

The name follows SaaS for a reason

The acronym is deliberate. SaaS — Software as a Service — replaced software you install and maintain with software someone else runs for you. Your CRM, your helpdesk, your accounting system, your webshop: each is somebody else's problem to host, patch, and keep online.

That worked. It worked so well that the average company now runs dozens of these systems, and every one of them holds a piece of a process that spans several of the others. An order arrives in one place, has to become a shipment somewhere else, an invoice in a third system, and a message in a channel where someone notices it.

SaaS solved running the tools. It did nothing about the space between them.

iPaaS is the same trade applied to that space. Instead of maintaining your own integration code — a script on a server, a scheduled job someone set up years ago, a queue nobody owns — you build the integration on a hosted platform and let it handle the running.

The other members of the family follow the same pattern: PaaS gives you somewhere to deploy applications, IaaS gives you raw compute. iPaaS is narrower and more opinionated than either, because it exists to do one thing.

What an iPaaS actually does

Strip away the vendor language and every iPaaS is offering four jobs:

Connect. Reach the systems you use — over HTTP APIs, file transfer, mailboxes, databases — and authenticate to each one properly, without hard-coding a password into a script.
Transform. Data almost never arrives in the shape the receiving system wants. The platform parses, reshapes, filters, and combines it in between.
Orchestrate. Decide what runs, in what order, and when. Branches, loops, retries on failure, and triggers — a clock, an inbound webhook, a file appearing in a directory.
Observe. Show you what ran, what it did, and what broke. An integration you cannot inspect is an integration you cannot trust.

A tool that does only the first is a connector library. A tool that does all four, and runs them for you, is an iPaaS.

"Couldn't I just write a script?"

Often, yes — and if a single scheduled script genuinely solves your problem, write it. The honest case for an iPaaS isn't that integration logic is hard to write. It's that the logic is the small part.

The rest is what accumulates:

Somewhere for it to run, that stays running, and that someone patches.
A scheduler, and a way to know when the scheduler stopped firing.
Credential storage that isn't a file on a server.
Retry behaviour, so a partner's five minutes of downtime doesn't silently drop an order.
A log of what happened, kept long enough to answer "did this go through last Tuesday?"
Some way for the next person to understand it after you've moved on.

Each of those is a few days of work and then a permanent, quiet maintenance obligation. Multiply by every integration you own. That's the real bill, and it's the one an iPaaS is priced against — not against the afternoon it took to write the first script.

The handover point matters too. A script is legible to whoever wrote it. A flow you can open and read is legible to the team, which is the difference between an integration the business owns and one that leaves when a single person does.

What "as a Service" is doing in the name

It's the same promise as in SaaS, applied to infrastructure you'd otherwise be running yourself:

No servers. No capacity to plan, no operating system to keep current, no 3 a.m. page because a disk filled.
It scales with the work. A quiet week and a spike on the last day of the month are the platform's problem.
You pay for use, not for readiness. Idle integrations cost close to nothing.
Improvements arrive without a migration. New connectors, better tooling, security fixes — you get them by logging in.

The trade is real and worth naming: your integrations run on someone else's platform, under their terms, availability, and data residency. Those are questions to ask any iPaaS vendor before you commit — ours are answered in the terms of service and the subprocessor list.

Where Flovello fits

Traditional enterprise iPaaS platforms earned the category a reputation: powerful, expensive, and slow to adopt — measured in consultants and quarters rather than afternoons. Flovello is built on the belief that the capability and the ceremony were never the same thing.

You build by connecting nodes, not by writing code. A pipeline is a graph you can read: triggers start it, execution pins set the order, and typed argument pins carry data between steps. Wire the wrong types together and the editor refuses the connection — before it ever runs.
You reach anything with an API. HTTP request with OAuth2 or token authentication covers most systems, with dedicated nodes for FTP, email, and Slack.
You trigger on a clock or on a request. Schedule for recurring work, Receive HTTP for webhooks and inbound calls from your own systems.
You can describe it instead of drawing it. Flovello AI builds a working pipeline from a plain-language description of what you want to happen.
Every run is inspectable. The Executions view shows what ran, what each node produced, and where a failure started.

Start with the first pipeline tutorial if you'd rather see it than read about it — it goes from an empty canvas to a running automation.