You’re growing your online business and adopting new tools and technologies to accept payments and prevent fraud. So far, so good! You’re building new infrastructure, but it’s starting to look fragmented and it’s costing a ton in resources. Your technology, which should be driving global opportunity, is instead absorbing your most valuable resource: your engineering talent.
You’ve got near-constant, non-strategic upkeep of existing payments connections, compliance, and custom code is costing you time and money.
It’s relentless, it’s a drain, and it’s a total drag. We call it the Engineering Time Tax. It slows your speed to market and it stifles your innovation. It transforms your development team from a strategic asset into an expensive, reactive maintenance crew.
Let’s dive deeper into the problem, detail its specific causes, and then look at a clear, actionable model for solving it to reclaim your focus on what matters most: earning more revenue
What is the engineering time tax?
The Engineering Time Tax is the time your developers spend on any activity that is non-strategic or non-revenue-generating. Things like building custom integrations, managing API version updates, fixing brittle connections. It’s the time spent on keeping the status quo functioning rather than time invested in building features that generate new revenue or unlock new markets.
It’s probably something you’re already concerned about, as it’s really a profound business obstacle.
We found, in our 2025 State of Checkout Report, that a meaningful share of businesses we surveyed had reported dedicating a full one quarter or more of their engineering resources to payments upkeep.
Think about the absolutely immense opportunity cost that this represents. If one were to lead a development team of 40 people, then 25% of their capacity is consumed by payments maintenance.
That’s 10 highly paid, full-time equivalent engineers who are permanently diverted from strategic initiatives. Instead of developing a new billing feature or implementing the localization tactics needed to succeed in the LATAM region, they’re patching again payments infrastructure.
That means the Engineering Time Tax is more than just a technical annoyance–it’s a strategic failure.
At the heart of this problem is the complexity of scaling for global commerce. The very second you go beyond using a single, basic payment processor, you’re drawn into a labor-intensive cycle of custom development.
In the 2025 State of Checkout Report, we learn:
The modern payment ecosystem is characterized by a high degree of fragmentation and specialization, leading to organizations relying on numerous third-party integrations for various payment-related services.
Every new payment gateway, fraud detection service, or Local Payment Method (LPM) comes with its own proprietary API, specific date format, and unique set of maintenance demands.
What’s worse is that all these systems are siloed, don’t talk to each other, and are an absolute pain in the #$% when it comes to sharing critical tokenized data or even when just trying to make sure there’s basic functionality and reporting across providers.
You’re spending money on bespoke glue code rather than building customer-facing value.
Those are the basics, let’s get into the details.
The three taxes your engineering team is paying today
You see the problem now, and you’re probably living something similar to what you just read above. But to really accurately quantify The Engineering Time Tax, we’re going to need to dissect the specific technical and compliance barriers that are getting sucked up into your development budget.
These are the three taxes that are most responsible for disrupting your velocity and blocking innovation.
Tax 1: Compliance, security, and scope creep
PCI DSS compliance is an unavoidable, high-resource commitment for any company handling cardholder data. How big is the scope of this compliance? It’s an (almost) 1:1 match with the amount of sensitive data your systems touch.
For example, if your team is maintaining multiple, separate integrations, your PCI scope is significantly larger. Your teams are managing certifications and continuously auditing for every single processor and proprietary tokenization system you use.
The cost includes not just the financial penalties for non-compliance, but the persistent consumption of engineering cycles needed for quarterly scans, annual audits, and system patching to maintain certification.
To free up developer resources, you’ll need a solution that centralizes security and tokenization, reducing the need to manage compliance with every individual integration. More on that later.
Freeing up developer resources requires a solution that centralizes security and tokenization, reducing the need to manage compliance with every individual integration.
Tax 2: The multi-gateway management and maintenance maze
It’s just not possible to scale on a global level with a single payment processor. As your business grows, you’ll inevitably begin adopting multiple payment providers to improve authorization rates in specific regions or to combat vendor lock-in.
This is a step that immediately introduces a management maze. Every new connection is a custom project and it creates immediate technical debt with several developer burdens.
API Mapping and Normalization
Every gateway responds with different transaction codes, error messages, and data formats. That means your developers have to write custom code to map all these proprietary responses into a single, understandable format for your internal systems.
It’s a complex layer of development and requires constant updating whenever a provider changes its API version.
- Token Management Silos: Your different gateways do not share tokenized data. This forces your team to either maintain separate, non-portable customer profiles in each system or write custom vaulting solutions, which increases PCI scope and data migration risk.
- Failover and Retry Logic: If you have even a single point of failure during peak traffic times, it can be–and no hyperbole here–catastrophic. We’re talking about highly complex custom logic that is absolutely essential for revenue retention. But, at the same time, it’s a distraction from your core product.
Tax 3: The reconciliation and data silo nightmare
Closing the books accurately requires clean, synchronized settlement data. When you operate a multi-gateway stack, the problem is that your data is siloed and formatted differently by each provider. This means your engineering team has to dedicate valuable time to:
- Custom Reporting Pipelines: Building and maintaining scripts to pull, clean, and harmonize transaction data from disparate systems so your finance team can reconcile sales and refunds.
- Granular Data Access: Your operations teams need real-time data to spot dips in authorization rates by region or card type. Building this level of granular, multi-source reporting capability is an intense, ongoing engineering commitment.
Creating engineering time tax write-offs
The demand from development teams is universal: they need to deliver new functionality faster and significantly reduce the time spent on integration and maintenance. Whether you’re an online merchant or a social media magnate, all of that is true for everyone.
The structural solution for merchants is to move away from point-to-point connections and embrace an open payments ecosystem. It completely eliminates the need for your engineers to build a custom project for every new payment capability. Instead, you integrate once with a platform that connects you to the entire ecosystem.
This single integration will give you immediate and tangible benefits by offloading the non-core burden:
- Massive integration acceleration: You gain access to a platform that already offers connections to over 140 gateways and 40+ local payment methods. This turns a months-long integration project into a simple configuration task.
- Focus on differentiation: By abstracting the connectivity layer, you’ll free up developer resources to focus on your company's core value proposition. Your engineers can now build the differentiating features that your customers will pay for, rather than spending hours maintaining payment code. It’s the difference between writing custom software and building a business.
It’s a change that’s easy to make that immediately eliminates much of the Engineering Time Tax. You simply plug into the platform, and the orchestrator handles the rest, allowing your engineers to focus on maximum value.
Because the work they would do has already been done.
You new payments tech stack: secure, flexible, reliable, and compliant
You’ve got a clear, measurable mandate: increase focus on core value and improve the probability that every transaction successfully completes. You’re going to need your payments infrastructure to transform from a maintenance sink into a machine of revenue optimization.
It all starts with payment orchestration and an open payments platform. You’re moving on to the most mature and efficient stage of your payment infrastructure.
Here’s what you’ll have that your engineering teams will no longer have to worry about:
- Tokenization Portability and Flexibility: A platform’s universal token vault is a critical technical asset. It stores and manages tokens from multiple gateways, guaranteeing portability.
Your engineers stop managing proprietary token formats and are freed from the existential threat of vendor lock-in or a massive card portfolio swap. You get instant performance switching without all the data migration complexity. - Autonomous Revenue Optimization: A payments orchestration platform manages the real-time performance of all your gateways and dynamically routes transactions to the one known for the highest success rate in that specific context. This is Intelligent Payment Routing, an operational feature that automatically maximizes revenue capture.
Your engineers don’t have to write or maintain this complex routing logic; the system is already optimized to work for you. - Decoupled PCI Compliance: By centralizing all card data within a universal vault, you drastically reduce your own PCI scope. This immediately frees up engineers and reduces the need for them to spend time on continuous, non-core security certifications and audits. This is a critical reduction in the Time Tax.
- Empowering the Entire Organization: An open payments platform is built to unlock the full value of your payments data for teams across the business. Your finance team finally gets access to normalized, granular settlement data and reconciliation tools. Operations teams can view real-time, actionable performance reporting. Your support team can instantly look up a customer’s full payment history to resolve issues quickly. This turns payment data into organizational intelligence.
Now you’ve moved from a reactive approach—constantly fixing broken code and dealing with unexpected performance drops—to a proactive one, where your payments stack is an optimized machine that works for you.
You’ve stopped paying the tax and have started investing in your future.
Axe the engineering time tax
Your business needs revenue, and you need a particular set of tools to achieve your goals. You shouldn’t be competing on maintenance, you should be maximizing every dollar from every customer.
Your payment strategy is the ultimate lever for your bottom line, directly boosting authorization rates and slashing compliance costs. And when you bring an open payments performance platform into the mix, you start to move from merely processing payments to actually maximizing customer lifetime value.
Stop wasting budget and time. Axe the engineering time tax and just use the tools that have already been built.
