Enterprise B2B SaaS and agentic products not only want to read and write data into their customer’s system of record, but they want to know when specific changes happened. In our most advanced deep connectors, Ampersand supports listening to these changes through our subscribe actions.
Adding real-time subscribe support to a provider previously meant work in our open-source connectors library and additional Ampersand platform work before we could fully deploy. Now subscribe actions can be added directly to our public repo without the need for platform work.
Supporting a subscribe action for a new provider in Ampersand includes:
- Understanding the provider: how it signs its webhooks, what its events look like
- Registering and configuring the subscription: how to register the event, how to configure the subscribe action (moved to the connectors library)
- Running each event: routing it to the right installation, fetching the full record and mapping it to the correct fields, delivering it to the destination
Platform work unblocks open-source builders
Take every provider that gained real-time this summer and count how much work was required by a platform engineer.
| Provider | Added | Platform PRs |
|---|---|---|
| Jobber | 7 Jul | |
| Attio | 21 Jul | |
| Google Calendar | 27 Jul | |
| 7 Aug the per-provider subscribe logic fully moves into the connectors library | ||
| Stripe | 12 Aug | none |
| Zoho Mail | 14 Aug | none |
Subscribe connector work no longer requires separate engineers to build in the Ampersand platform, which increases our open-source contributor velocity.
The path is seven documented pull requests in the connectors library, and the provider stays switched off until the last one merges.
Available now
The connectors library is public and MIT licensed, so the work behind every real-time provider is readable, including the guides describing how each one was added.