The hidden cost of building social integrations

The estimate you never make

Someone in your company decides you need social media integration. You bring it to engineering. The estimate lands around 2–3 weeks — time to hit the API, map the data model, write some tests, ship.

That estimate is wrong. Not because engineers are bad at estimating, but because the obvious work is only a fraction of what building social integrations actually involves.

I have built this infrastructure before. I know exactly where the time goes. It is not in the happy path — it is in everything around it.

OAuth: one week per platform, minimum

Authentication is where the first week disappears. Every social platform has implemented OAuth differently — sometimes very differently.

Twitter/X uses OAuth 2.0 with PKCE for user auth and OAuth 1.0a for some legacy endpoints. LinkedIn uses three-legged OAuth 2.0 with a separate process for getting elevated access. Meta requires your app to go through App Review before you can request certain permissions at all. TikTok has its own OAuth flow that changed substantially in 2023.

Beyond the flows themselves: you need secure token storage, refresh logic (more on that below), scope management, and the ability to handle the platform revoking access without warning. That is not a weekend of work. Budget one full week per platform for auth alone — and that assumes no complications.

Platform review: 2–8 weeks of waiting

This is the cost that blindsides teams most often. Several major platforms do not let you go live until they have reviewed your app.

Meta App Review is the most involved. You need to record a screencast demonstrating every permission your app requests, write a detailed explanation of use cases, and submit it for review. Expect two to six weeks — longer if they request changes. LinkedIn's partner program has a similar process for production access to publishing APIs.

This time is almost entirely out of your control. You submit. You wait. You fix whatever they ask for. You wait again. If your product depends on these platforms being live before a launch date, plan for this to slip that date.

The review process is not a formality. It is a weeks-long dependency that sits on your critical path.

The media pipeline no one talks about

Posting text is straightforward. As soon as you add images or video, you are now building a media processing pipeline — and it is different for every platform.

Instagram requires images to be square or within a specific aspect ratio range, with a maximum file size of 8 MB. LinkedIn has different size limits for personal posts versus company page posts. TikTok requires video in H.264 or H.265, between 3 and 60 seconds, at a specific minimum bitrate.

You need to resize, re-encode, validate, and handle upload failures. And when a platform quietly changes their media specs — which they do — your pipeline breaks and you find out when a user reports that their images are not posting.

Maintenance: the cost that compounds

Here is the number that most build-vs-buy analyses undercount: the ongoing cost of keeping integrations alive.

Social platforms deprecate API versions. Twitter went from v1.1 to v2 and broke most third-party apps. Meta periodically retires older Graph API versions with months of notice — sometimes less. When a platform deprecates an endpoint, that work lands in your queue regardless of what else is happening.

Token refresh failures cause silent disconnections that users blame on your product. Rate limit policy changes require you to update your retry logic. New platform features mean new endpoints, new scopes, new review cycles.

This is not a one-time project. It is a recurring cost that scales with the number of platforms you support.

Real numbers

If you are building for five platforms with a developer at €100/hour:

• Initial build — 8 weeks × 40 hours × 5 platforms × €100 = €160,000
• Annual maintenance — 3 weeks × 40 hours × 5 platforms × €100 = €60,000/year
• Year 1 total: €220,000

These are conservative estimates. They do not include the platform review time where nothing is shipping, or the on-call cost when an integration breaks at 2 AM before a customer presentation.

You can adjust these numbers for your situation using the calculator on our compare page.

The alternative

SocialRouter handles all of this: OAuth flows, token management, platform review approvals, media processing, rate limiting, API version upgrades. You make a single API call to post to any platform we support. We maintain the integrations so you do not have to.

The question is not whether to use a managed service or build in-house. The question is whether social media infrastructure is a core competency your company should be building — or a commodity you should be buying.

For most teams, the answer is obvious once you have done the real estimate.

Questions? I am happy to talk through whether SocialRouter is the right fit for your use case: hello@socialrouter.eu.