# What is iPaaS?

> iPaaS is a subscription service that connects your business apps to each other. Learn how it works, what it costs at volume, and where it stops being enough.

iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is a hosted service that connects your business applications to each other, so you rent the plumbing between systems instead of building and maintaining every connection yourself.

Updated 6 Aug 2026

## What it does for your business.

iPaaS stands for Integration Platform as a Service. In plain terms it is a subscription that sits between your applications and moves data between them, so you rent the plumbing instead of laying every pipe yourself. You log into one dashboard, pick the two apps, and set rules for what should copy across. For a business running a handful of common tools with no in-house developer, that is often the fastest way to stop rekeying data.

## How it works.

The platform maintains ready-made connectors to hundreds of popular applications and keeps them working when the vendors change things, which is the real product you are paying for. You configure a flow: when a deal is marked won in the CRM, create an invoice in accounting with these fields. The platform runs it, retries failures, and shows a log of what ran. Pricing is usually per task or per operation, so your cost tracks volume.

## Where a platform stops being enough.

Two limits. Cost at volume, because a fraction of a cent per task is nothing at a thousand runs and a real line item at half a million. And logic, because anything beyond straightforward mapping, judgement about free text, multi-step decisions, conditional pricing, gets awkward inside a visual canvas. A common pattern is to keep iPaaS for the simple, low-volume connections and build directly for the two or three flows that carry your operations.

The Voltade take

If an iPaaS subscription solves your problem, use it. We build direct connections where the volume, the logic or the reliability requirement makes a middleman more expensive than it looks, and we are happy to leave the easy syncs on a platform your team can edit without calling us.

Related pages

What is an API integration · What is ETL · What is data integration · Build vs buy software

More from the glossary

AI Agent · PSG Grant · AI Agent vs Chatbot

## Want to see this in action?

Talk to Volty

Free scoping session. We'll tell you what's possible, what it costs, and whether a PSG or IMDA grant covers it.

SMEs are eligible for up to 50% Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) support for the adoption of Voltade AI solutions, a Pre-Approved Solution under the IMDA SMEs Go Digital programme.

## Links

- [What is an API integration](https://voltade.com/sg/resources/glossary/what-is-an-api-integration)
- [What is ETL](https://voltade.com/sg/resources/glossary/what-is-etl)
- [What is data integration](https://voltade.com/sg/resources/glossary/what-is-data-integration)
- [Build vs buy software](https://voltade.com/sg/resources/glossary/build-vs-buy-software)
- [AI Agent](https://voltade.com/sg/resources/glossary/what-is-an-ai-agent)
- [PSG Grant](https://voltade.com/sg/resources/glossary/what-is-psg-grant)
- [AI Agent vs Chatbot](https://voltade.com/sg/resources/glossary/ai-agent-vs-chatbot)